We have seen such incredible images of resistance in the past few years that we thought to put them into a common gallery and publish them as a release.

The images in this slideshow are from Egypt, Occupied Palestine, Iraq, and America, and they speak out against respective issues in those countries. These images were not originally published by mainstream media outlets. They were taken or designed by individual citizens and originally published, in most cases, on blogs and social media platforms. That they have been so inspirational and have found distribution even in some cases despite the efforts of media titans is a testament to the changing nature of political communications around the world.

Our collection is limited in scope at the moment, with some of them coming from archives of stories we covered in our active period (2010-2012). Emerging conflicts in Syria and the old Soviet Republics, as well as in numerous African and Latin American countries, remain unrepresented in this gallery. We encourage submissions here.

Collected by Alloul Jaafar, published November 11th, 2013.

"Visit Palestine" is a Palestinian awareness campaign that uses
historical ‘tourism’ images of the Jewish Agency to assert the
existence of Palestine and the anti-colonial struggle of its people.
Up until this very day, expansionist politicians inside of Israel keep
asserting that no Palestine has ever existed and that no Palestine
exists now. As a grassroots initiative, the "Visit Palestine" campaign
defies such ongoing colonial discourse by using images that were
paradoxically initially designed by Western-educated Zionists
themselves (Franz Kraus, 1936). Thus alerting people around the world
–once more, often tourists- in easy-to-understand mediums, that
Palestine has a historical dimension and that its inhabitants are
still seeking emancipation and civic entitlements therein. The “Visit
Palestine” campaign is today often overlooked in ‘grand’ conflict
analysis, but precisely therefore it is significant, as it highlights
not only the understated but ongoing political reassertion of
Palestinian civil society after the Second Intifada, but it also
alerts one of the fact that in today’s world socio-political
conscience is more and more shaped by subtle visual imagery than mere
text. For an in-depth examination of the movement,
read Alloul Jaafar's Visit Palestine.

photo by Miriam Alister/EPA

VISIT PALESTINE
The Ongoing Struggle for Representation in the Land of Milk and Honey
ALLOUL JAAFAR - 09 OCTOBER 2013

To read the entire text, scroll below and either read the article as it appears on the site or use the Scribd document view provided. Alternatively, you may download the PDF file here.

ABSTRACT   This article analyzes various historical and contemporary political discourses and visualizations of the notions of Homeland, Nationhood and Otherness within the sphere of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It discusses a resurgent set of historical Zionist posters that have recently surfaced within the circles of Palestinian grassroots activism –the most emblematic among them carrying the message to ‘Visit Palestine’. These images represent the latter group’s attempt to reclaim historical ‘existence’ by means of erecting an original, counter-discursive methodology of visual ‘resistance’, targeting Israel’s foundational myth of ‘Terra Nullius’ along with broadly challenging its relentless colonial epistemology. This study reasserts that Palestinian society is, hitherto, still engaged in a primarily colonial conflict in which it thus also has to intellectually engage with the romantic derivates of European-colonial thought next to merely countering more manifest forms of oppression and exploitation. Hence, discussing the posters’ dialectic alternation by Palestinian activists over time –who apply similar ‘signs’ with different connotations for a divergent political aim (decolonization)- inevitably comes along with a comprehensive contextualization of the intellectual origins of such historical Zionist propaganda. Therefore, this article touches not only on the widely cited context of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Arab migration and displacement flows, but furthermore engages in a more profound discussion of the 'migration' of such underlying ideas as Nationhood and Homeland, which allow for socio-political exclusion to operate in the first place. Only via intellectual objectification does one detect the very similarity of doctrine within the fluid migration of regressive ideologies across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries throughout both Europe and the Middle East. By means of critically tracing and decoding the altering semiotic identity of such politicized posters, one is comprehensively alerted of both the key importance and the ongoing use of abstract power (discourse) within this ensuing Levantine conflict. In order to fully interpret the selected posters, as visual exponents of the contemporary sociology of power, one needs foremost to be acquainted with the interwoven ‘migration’ of populations, ideas, and praxes (colonial resonance) through both time and space.

 

KEY WORDS   Settler-Colonialism, Migration, Nationalism, Discourse, Otherness, Zionism, ‘Palestine’

1. Introduction: The Dialectic Origins of Zionist and Palestinian National Mythology

It is absolutely necessary to first start by briefly highlighting the basic features of the national ideologies that are present in the Israeli-Palestinian topography. Only subsequent to gaining insight into the origins and intellectual blueprints of both Zionism and contemporary Palestinian nationalism, can one make sense of the actual constellation of conflict in the Southern Levant. Moreover, only thereafter is it deemed intellectually consistent to embark on a particular discussion thereto, treating a set of selected posters that are to be situated in the subaltern sphere of Palestinian visual resistance and which can freely be dubbed as the ‘Visit Palestine’ campaign. These politicized images, which have turned into popular sales items in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (oPt) ever since the late 2000s, have so far not been properly discussed or contextualized within the Palestinian population’s overall political engagement with Israel’s colonial design of a fragmented and ‘caged’ existence in segregated habitats.

Current day Israel and the oPt are the sceneries of ideological visions and their projections that are no mere abstractions, but which are rather manifest in the day-to-day reality of both the urban-rural space and its inhabitants. The Zionist movement in the Levant has ever since the early 19th century endeavored to establish a ‘Jewish State’. They have come to do so with effective vigor and outcome since the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, also referred to as the ‘War of Independence’ in the Zionist narrative and as the ‘Catastrophe’ (i.e. ‘An-Nakba’) in Palestinian and Arab national discourse.[1] The first substantial initiations of the ‘Aliyah’, or immigration movement of people who identified themselves or were persecuted as ‘Jews’, took place in the late 19th century through the establishment of agricultural enclaves in the Southern Levantine area of the Ottoman Empire. Most of the immigrants were seeking a safe-haven from anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia. At the time being, Zionism was only one of the ideologies that circulated amongst ‘global Jewry’, along with that of national assimilation (e.g. Stefan Zweig, Alfred Dreyfus etc.[2]) and international socialism, for instance. Subsequent to World War I (WWI), the Hebrew term ‘Aliyah’ came to refer mainly to the newly established British Mandate for Palestine, which was dubbed as ‘Erez Israel’, or the ‘Land of Israel’, by the Zionist movement. Such terminology was introduced during one of the World Zionist Conferences in Europe to pinpoint a particular geography for ‘return’, which was furthermore encoded with a mythological connotation. As a conservative association, which initially secular-based, the Zionist movement propagated ideas of a heterogeneous Jewish nation who’s unique faith of dispersion (‘Diaspora’) was said to immediately date back to the ‘Babylonian Exile’. The movement is utterly emblematic for Europe’s age of nationalist thought. Nationalist sentiment was further strengthened by particular elements of religious origin, hence disseminating a doctrine of both national and religious/biblical ‘continua’. This newly conceived ideology stipulated the given and exclusive right of the ‘Jewish nation’ to a particular geographical space. Such a political discourse that rests on the backbone of a delineated ‘landscape’ and a particular ‘nation’ clearly roots in the 19th century European[3] tradition of romantic nationalism.[4]

When Britain obtained a League of Nations mandate[5] over Palestine, Transjordan[6] and Iraq subsequent to WWI and issued the Balfour Declaration outlining British support for a ‘Jewish national home’ in Mandate Palestine, Zionist aspirations gained a more feasible momentum and active dimension. This would over time only increase, especially after the Nazi horrors of World War II (WWII), thus altering European public opinion in favor of ‘Jewish’ self-determination. This would then revive Zionism, as a conservative ideology, from its rather marginalized position in the intellectual periphery. The influx of European Jews strongly related to the Levant’s geographical proximity to Europe and the US’s reluctance to accept large numbers of Jews onto its territory during the immediate aftermath of WWII. However, it was also the ideological attraction of a Jewish nation-state that made many victims of the War, traumatized by a lack of civic protection by their previous states, migrate to British Mandate Palestine to join the Zionist movement.[7]

Similar to all national mythologies, Zionism propagates an imagined Golden Age (king David’s Levantine dynasty), a National Tragedy (destruction of the Temple & subsequent Diaspora), and a projected future of glorious National Resurrection (state of Israel). This national ideology was mainly linked to British Mandate Palestine due to its exploitative convenience of imbuing an emotional biblical connotation, a great mobilizing potential. However, the early Zionists who were predominantly secular-based[8] did, in their pragmatism, also consider Uganda, for instance. Their geographical choice has, however, clearly had its political consequences since that strip of land was of course inhabited, leaving the possibility for an imperial doctrine of ‘Terra Nullius’ (typically) void. The myth of the ‘empty’ land was nevertheless a discursive strategy that was and still is applied, which will only become further untenable over time as has been the case in North America. Today, Zionism is still consciously embodied by the state of Israel, across its institutions, and it continues to exert active colonization strategies through 1) its network of subsidized settlements in the West Bank, 2) its consistent policy of land and resource[9] grabbing, and 3) its ongoing endorsement of the ‘Law of Return’[10]. Despite serious condemnation of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and various UN organizations over 400,000 Israeli settlers are currently living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The Israeli construction of the so-called ‘Barrier’ -which clearly defers from the 1967 UN-demarcated Green Line- along with the Israeli settlement network were engineered by former Prime Minister Sharon[11] as dual structures to rid Israel of its ‘native problem’. Due to this structure of fences and walls, a large segment of the Palestinian population is now effectively cut off from its main centers of socio-economic activity, where are increasingly situated on what the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) inventively dubs ‘the Israeli side of the Barrier’. As a consequence, the Palestinian population in the oPt has ever since the early 2000s been confined in a minimum amount of space with a minimum sum of resources. As such, an undesired plebs is caged and ignored to the maximum. It is also worthy to mention that such ideological and territorial objectives are generally shared across the Israeli political spectrum, that is, from the Labor Party to the Right-wing Likud Party. Furthermore, this ensuing policy has systematically undermined Palestinian prospects for a mediated solution (UN Partition Resolution, Oslo Agreements, Road Map) towards meaningful Palestinian territorial continuity and political viability. Today, one can already speak of the fait accompli of what is dubbed as the ‘Bantustanization’ of the West Bank, subtly engineered as early as the Oslo Agreements –seen altogether as the point of capitulation by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to Israel’s colonial design by such scholars as the late Edward Said.[12]

Although its historical constellation differs from other colonization processes -for example, South Africa, French Algeria, which were based on direct labor exploitation-, Israel remains today one of the last of such physically active, colonizing nation-states. When speaking of post-1967 settlement activity, it is important not to minimize the role of the settler-colonial process to contemporary topographies such as the oPt and Gaza, but rather to contextualize them within Zionism’s structural continuities of socio-political discrimination within the entirety of British Mandate Palestine. This implies not interpreting the Palestinian polity, its populations and geographies, as a-priori fragmented units for analysis, for there would be no objective incentive to do so. Many contemporary, rather impressionistic analyses of popular (media) topics (‘Hamas’) prove that the colonial gaze is still overrepresented in mainstream scholarship and thus latently also demonstrates the vigor of Israel’s continuous epistemic mystification of its main political operation. The latter sort of inquiry often tends to focus uniquely on micro-politics, void of any structural contextualization or ontological positioning, for that matter.[13] 

Although regional Arab nationalism was certainly present in the Levant from the late 19th and early 20th century –in a dialectic relation to early Turkish nationalism[14] of the Young Turk movement[15] within the ‘ailing’ Ottoman Empire (‘The Sick Man of Europe’)[16]- the Levantine population of the early 20th century was a rather rural-based society, typed by a sense of very localized forms of ‘identity’. In that exact region, they did hence not embody nor assert a nationalist vision that was comparable to that of the Zionist enterprise. In the countryside a system of feudal landlords existed, who constituted an intermediary position within the diffuse system of administrative Ottoman rule that was backed up by a clan-based system of authority. In the cities, however, an urban merchant class did exist and it was them who formed the backbone of the proto-Palestinian and Arab National movements that generated the Great Arab Revolt[17] of 1936-39 during the Interbellum period in defiance of British rule and the systematic exclusion of Arab labor by the Histradut/Jewish Labor Federation. Preceding WWI, the independent emergence of this urban Palestinian class, without much incentive from Istanbul, related to the European merchants’ capitalist access to the area subsequent to the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of 1839-76 that created coastal pockets of urban commerce. Although their interest was of local nature, hitherto, a sense of loyalty and Belonging related more to family (clan) and the city/village than the modernist notion of a delineated ‘nation’. In historical perspective, it can thus be argued that notions of ‘Palestinian identity’ of the Arab populations in British Mandate Palestine, as we see/hear them voiced today, would only take form from the second half of the 20thcentury[18] onward, namely through the distinctive experience of forced migration and residence in refugee camps, brought about by the establishment of the state of Israel following the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.[19]

It can thus be argued that both Israeli Zionism and post-1948 Palestinian nationalism are intrinsically intertwined and can, intellectually speaking, generally be related to European nationalist thought of the 19th century due to their romanticized visions of landscape. Zionism, it is argued, can even be seen as a particular ideological extension[20] or intensification of European settler-colonialism, hence interpreting Palestinian nationalism as a particular (causal) reaction to it, next to its mere localization within broader Arab nationalism. Hereby, it can furthermore be argued that this constellation of Israeli settler-colonialism is an ongoing one: Israeli society is no ‘post-Zionist’ one, Palestinians are not yet engaged in a proper post-colonial state-building phase under basal territorial sovereignty, and the substantial segment of Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent are not yet recognized as an egalitarian minority with similar constitutional entitlements. On the contrary, hitherto the manifest colonization of the West Bank and the catastrophic blockade of Gaza by the Israeli authorities still constitute the daily reality in the region. Although it has been quite understated in scholarly work, the West Bank can be considered as any ’semi-colony’ in this respect, wherein the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) is seen to function mainly as a comprador client to co-manage certain colonial cages of Palestinian-Arab populations rather than actually representing its people in a meaningful, or even democratic, manner. It is within such a context of conflict that the self-declared Palestinian leadership in the West Bank (PNA) has resorted to merely inflating ideas of narrow Palestinian nationalism as a supposed solution for a shared calamity. Any other methodologies for socio-political progress, that are intellectually more comprehensive, have effectively been ignored by the Fatah patronage. The most pertinent one would amount to framing opposition to Zionist policies in civic terms, by means of proposing legal egalitarianism and civic disobedience when deemed necessary –as was the case during the bottom-up First Intifada. A status quo of caged communities that are high on nationalism in both the Southern Levant, and the broader Middle East for that matter, can hardly be attributed any sense of progressive political vision.[21]

If Humanism and Liberalism are lacking in this persistent age of Middle Eastern micro-nationalism, than Machiavellian Realism is surely thriving in situ. In fact, ever since 1948 the entire political configuration of power in the region has been centered on this very geographical fragmentation and mental constellation via the gradual proliferation of Israeli military domination, backed by consecutive Western powers (Britain & France, US, EU)[22]. One could argue that it is only via an understanding of Israel’s structural, imperialist penetration and military supervision of the surrounding Arab, inter-state complex -hosting vast quantities of the world’s most precious resources and commodities (gas, and oil)- that one can make analytical sense of Zionism’s functional relationship with the transnational capital of the Western centers of power. When observing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the broader context of the Middle East’s geopolitical importance for the energy-based global economy, keen scholars of history would immediately notice that contemporary inflations of politicized ‘Jewish’ and ‘Muslim’ holiness of strips of land were only added and made important (revived) later, as additional and rather opportunistic dimensions of the two rather futile national projects, by the local political influence of both religious Zionists and Palestinian Islamists/conservative nationalists. Having provided a basic outlay for framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along materialist lines, this inquiry can now proceed with ontological ease to critically put sociological notions such as nationalism, landscape, power-discourse and, most importantly, their intertwining, central within a discussion of visual representations of such appreciative categories as Belonging, Homeland, the Self and Other in the Israeli-Palestinian topography of conflict.[23]

2. Discussion: Projecting National Identity, Landscape & History in the Southern Levant

2.1 ‘Palestine’: A ‘Floating’ Referent

It is interesting that from a contemporary legal perspective ‘Palestine’, as often applied by Palestinian activists or ignorant political commentators, does not exist. One should hence interpret this term as a projection of Palestinian national discourse aiming at self-determination. Moreover, up until this very day, people in a position of power in Israel often do not even recognize or acknowledge the legally regulated Palestinian territories, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in their speech. For instance, instead of using ‘West Bank’, many such politicians apply biblical denotations to describe it, namely ‘Judea and Samaria’. An interview extract of Ray Dolphin’s excellent study entitled The West Bank Wall: Unmaking Palestine illustrates this vividly:

[…] Ha’aretz: You gave up the Gaza strip in order to save the West Bank? Is the Gaza disengagement meant to allow Israel to continue controlling the majority of the West Bank?

Weisglass: Arik [Sharon] doesn’t see Gaza today as an area of national interest. He does see Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] as an area of national interest. He thinks rightly that we are still very, very far from the time when we will be able to reach final-status-settlements in Judea and Samaria. […][24]

Clearly, the application of such ideological terminology relates to the projection of hegemony: one tries to actively redefine space here, according to a particular political doctrine by means of speech. In the case of Israel, it is quite effective due to the very fact that it constitutes the dominant discourse. Through such a power-discourse a structured hierarchy of terms, categories and appreciations is thus put forth to shape mainstream perception amongst the passive ‘listeners’ within what has been theorized as the Kafkaesque ‘society of the spectacle’, which modern capitalist societies have so typically come impersonate.[25] The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) stipulates the entirety of the legal Palestinian entities under the umbrella-term of ‘Palestinian Occupied Territories’ or, more often, through its acronym ‘oPt’. However, the selective use of capital letters in the latter abbreviation highlights both an institutionalization of counter-discursive, affirmative action vis-à-vis Israeli parlance, as well as an internalization of diplomatic prudence by simultaneously downplaying the first letter of the acronym that might refer to a controversial political practice (colonization). Such UN jargon centers mainly on a basal recognition of the existence of Palestinian people and their legitimate rights to claim a dignified life.[26]

Recently, the Israeli authorities started further restricting the freedom of movement of foreign nationals between the oPt, East Jerusalem and Israel proper[27]. Israel’s lack of general transparency when issuing visas is widely documented, but in early 2013 Ha’aretz interestingly indicated that the Israeli authorities reinitiated stamps that read ‘Judea and Samaria only’, for foreigners residing in the oPt, thus restricting them from other facilities in metropolitan Jerusalem or Israel. As renowned journalist Amira Hass indicated, this visa format is not an entirely new phenomenon for it has some precedents. However, a surge in its use stems most probably from Netanyahu’s Right-wing coalition’s recent head-on engagement with the PNA, following the latter’s unilateral move in November 2012 to upgrade its legal status in the UN, in an ongoing tit for tat quarrel that lacks any progressive long-term, political vision. What is of specific importance for this inquiry, however, is how Major Guy Inbar, the coordinator of Israeli affairs in the Palestinian Territories, claimed in a Ha’aretz interview that notwithstanding apparent ambiguities, nothing had really changed in the last six months, except for “the language used on the stamp”.[28]

As the four images in the enclosed annex demonstrate, the term ‘Palestine’ has been used denotatively across the 20th and 21st centuries. This has occurred, however, with very diverging connotative meanings, signaling a diachronic alternation of usage. These posters were initially issued in the first half of the 20th century by the proto-Zionist movement, namely by the Jewish Agency for Palestine. This was done in order to spread and advertise the idea of Jewish immigration to the British Mandate for Palestine. Today, however, Palestinian activists once again advertise these pictures as a guerilla strategy to mobilize sympathy for their own cause as a marginalized plebs. At present, one can easily find them displayed in various formal and informal tourist shops in the old city of Jerusalem –especially the case for figure IV.[29] The term ‘Palestine’ hence used to refer to British Mandate Palestine in the Zionist narrative and is now applied in the Palestinian national discourse to propagate and realize a political Homeland. Both ideological projections thus use, or used, similar terminology for different reasons, hence altering the code or ‘myth’ associated with a particular, literal term. This contemporary Palestinian counter-discourse can be seen as an intervention of ‘trans-coding’, i.e. the re-appropriation of new meanings to old Zionist terminology and imagery. This is ultimately done to try and alter the contemporary reality within its geographical referent, in which the term ‘Palestine’ has come to signify Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Moreover, Palestinian activists also use such Zionist representations as a manner of implicitly highlighting the historical strategies of the Zionist movement that continue to resonate in contemporary Israeli political doctrine, not least that of the virgin ‘Terra Nullius’[30] thesis that propagated the existence of a promised, uninhabited land. This myth was present in various colonial discourses, which were often deconstructed by critical scrutiny, or by the manifest struggles of various indigenous populations looking for inclusive recognition and civic equality, for example, Native Americans, Aboriginals, and Amazon Indians.[31] Moreover, such informative levels within the counter-discursive effort are combined with what could critically be dubbed as ‘semiotic intransigence’, or a state of semiotic defiance, whereby Zionist ideology is made redundant via the simply usage of a ‘defiant sign’. Such a thoughtful re-application of historical Zionist propaganda intrinsically sheds light not only on a causal status quo, but furthermore rejects the persistence of the colonial ‘gaze’ that reduces ‘Palestine’ as merely constituting the Bantustans inside the West Bank and the cage of Gaza. Instead, the diffuse character of the posters inevitably appropriates the entire contemporary topography of the historical British Mandate for Palestine along with the whole of the Palestinian-Arab and Jewish-Israeli populations, as cognitively relevant spaces and actors within the context of conflict. Indeed, it urges one to reflect and apply historical context for the comprehension of contemporary political affairs.[32]

Understanding the disadvantaged position of the Palestinian society when it comes to advocacy, resulting from the absence of a proper state and comprehensive representative government on a local and international level, segments of the Palestinian national movement have today resorted to strategies that are both cheap as well as effective. The poster campaign underscores the strength of images in the contemporary consumer world; we live in the age of visual imagery and no longer in one that is dominated by text. Such an increase in images with a minimum of accompanying text inherently implies an increase in connotations, both synchronically and diachronically speaking, which are effectively present in the fluid societal reception thereto. Meaning clearly alters over time or acquires divergent connotations in different contemporary settings. The strength of images is found in the fact that they can make us believe that a particular connotative meaning is de facto denotative (universal) and therefore objective or supposedly fixed, when this is in fact a delusive myth. The aforementioned Zionist posters were of course anchored with words, which were back then necessary to transform or ‘encode’ the visuals into a particular ‘story’, thus narrowing down the possibility of connotative meanings. Today, the Palestinian movement seems to favor using those Zionist posters that are most ambiguous and ‘amendable’. Figure IV, for instance, reads ‘Visit Palestine’ and includes a panorama of Old Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, including both the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Western ‘Wailing’ Wall from the point of view of the Mount of Olives. The conscious application of such historical, visual material in the Palestinian national struggle highlights its vibrant nature, that is, if one is studious enough to look beyond the face of formal Palestinian politics. In the tradition of the First Intifada, which was a culmination of broad grassroots organization from below, such imagery suggests a modest re-emergence of dialectic intellectual and popular participation in the resistance process. This had gradually been dying out subsequent to broad societal disillusionment and alienation after the PNA’s total capitalization on power and political discourse following the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s. These rather subtle signals of visual resistance alert the keen observer of the readiness of the Palestinian public to keep on engaging with Israel’s discursive machinery that often dominates mainstream perception, in a ‘war of position’. From a post-modern point of view it is interesting to note that such intellectual engagement is currently taking place independently from PNA patronage. One could argue that such dynamics will over time only further expose the latter’s irrelevance to the people it seeks to control rather than to represent.[33]

It is important to point out that the use of the term ‘Palestine’ was abandoned altogether by the Zionist movement after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, implying an intrinsic contestation of connotations. The fact that most of the contemporary Israeli public would not even understand the relevance of the term ‘Palestine’ within a Zionist discourse implies that the cultural and cognitive citizenship of the term ‘Palestine’ has effectively shifted. A new dialogic process has been established in relation thereto, which pertains today to the sphere of Palestinian liberation activism. This furthermore reinforces the aforementioned statement that ‘meaning’ is ultimately fluid throughout both space and time. This also implies that notions of meaning are intrinsically subjective, socially constructed, and thus contestable. Therefore, such widely acclaimed conceptions as ‘the’ objective ‘reality’, as a supposed consistent and independent externality, can similarly be disputed as widely contentious. Moreover, as various critical scholars have endeavored to point out, human beings –be it individuals or specific interest groups- actively construct ‘what’ is known and ‘how’ it is known. This fluidity of both ‘meaning’ and receptive ‘understanding’ is also quite evident in the case of the selected Zionist posters. Thinking otherwise, that is, stating a particular ‘norm’ or static ‘truth’ with regard to our cognitive ability to objectively make sense of our social surrounding as human beings, highlights foremost a process of unconscious internalization as ‘normal’ according to one’s very specific historical, societal, and personal constellation within that order. Whilst interpreting the world, we thus often ignorantly exert or reproduce an implicit system of shared societal rules and convictions next to merely embodying them. These set of socio-cognitive codes format, or at least affect, the cognitive framework of all units of a particular society on a daily basis. Hence comes forth the power of ‘discourse’ for its impact, which is articulated mostly via speech and/or imagery, is subtle but nevertheless profound in the construction of our worldview, and influential in the regulation of our social emotions and actions. One is hereby also alerted of the very ‘power’, often called privilege, which is derived from the mere possibility[34] to narrate publicly (a particular concern). In fact, power is often a prerequisite to do so; power thus often generates more power. It is such a concentration of discursive potential that enacts hegemony to sustain a particular perception in the public sphere. To wield influence on the flow of information and even on its total form is precious in the world of politics for its not only regulates ‘consciousness’ but consequently also popular mobilization and pacification in the face of a projected idea –‘action’ often paradoxically implies inaction in the face of manifest oppression or exploitation, when the public regime is characterized by fear. Clearly, both public opinion and singular connotations, as the chained sequences of ‘meaning’, are fluid in the minds of men precisely because there is such a large and intrinsic margin for external influence.[35]

With regard to the four posters in the enclosed annex, one should make note of the use of inter-textuality in the Zionists historical representations of ‘Palestine’ or ‘Erez Israel’. Especially biblical and historical terms can be associated to biblical mythology, for example, “See Ancient Beauty Revived”, “The Land of the Bible”. The connotative ‘meta-message’ here, or what has been conceptualized as the ‘signified’ along the lines of Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist linguistic renderings, attempts in this case to disseminate an ideology that mobilizes individuals to settle in a particular sanctified region in order to ‘revive’ the faith of their nation. Such ethnos based advocacy is strongly intertwined with romantic concepts of land and even, to the surprise of some, with Leftist notions of and labor (fertility, agriculture, collectivity, empowerment etc). In the Zionist narrative ‘Palestine’ was often compared to an empty, ‘barren dessert’, waiting to be made fertile by its biblical heirs. It is hereby worthy to mention that cartography has long been deconstructed as often integral to colonial projects on the level discursive projections of dominance and hierarchy, next to its mere navigational functionality or esthetic value of expression. From the point of view of aesthetic philosophy, one could extrapolate such settler-colonial tendency on figure II that is enclosed in the annex, being an utterly ‘staged’ poster that displays the Levant’s geography and reads “Visit Erez Israel”. It can be termed as being a ‘mythological map’: a graphic practice of colonial fantasy, embedded in religious mythology. Many post-colonial scholars have successfully indicated that the colonial knowledge production of ‘The Orient’ incorporated a subtle set of preconceived hierarchies, which were then conveyed to audiences in order to generate and reinforce ‘common beliefs’ in colonial societies about both the colonized plebs and the colonized space. The relevant Zionist posters clearly carry strong myths and active silences, not least in relation to the local population. Such ‘silences’ function not along side discourse, as its limitative boundary, but rather form integral part of the projected regime of ‘truth’. Only by means of critically contemplating on the deeper ideological meaning of such historical representations within the entire context of the settler-colonial sequence, can one make sense of the specific political resonance and intellectual weight that lay behind their contemporary reapplication in the subaltern space of Palestinian resistance.[36]

2.2 A Monologue of the Violent Other: Palestinian ‘Terrorists’ in ‘Judea & Samaria’

In order to further elaborate on the Israeli construction of the Self, one should shed light on the ongoing Israeli discourse of geography. A scrutiny of the website of the Jewish Agency, an organization that was founded in 1929 at the 16th World Zionist Conference serving as the representative body for the Jewish population in British Mandate Palestine before the establishment of the state of Israel, together with those of UN organizations active in the oPt, such as that of UNOCHA, alerts attentive scholars of the great disparities in the production of maps of the West Bank.[37] Interestingly, the aforementioned markers ‘Judea and Samaria’, as Israeli geographies for the West Bank, are even accompanied by missiles on the website of the Jewish Agency, conveniently implying the acute need for Israel to further colonize the area from a ‘national security’ perspective. On their website, this picture is accompanied by the following text: “Missile and Artillery Ranges: This map illustrates Israel’s vulnerability to attack from Judea and Samaria. The range of artillery covers all of Israel’s main population centers”.[38] Today, the Jewish Agency is still an official organization, linked to the Israeli government and it facilitates the ongoing ‘call’ for ‘Jews’ worldwide to immigrate to Israel. This should alert scholars of the links between political interest and visual knowledge production. Violent imagery with regard to Palestinians is often linked to emotional referents, not least to existential genocide (Holocaust). This power mongering exploitation of historical human suffering is not only despicable, but, moreover, inconsistent within the constellation of conflict in the Middle East. As Noam Chomsky has indicated, the political status quo in the Levant is not merely reducible nor excusable via reference to Jewish suffering in WWII; such a pseudo-rationale is intentionally superficial and incoherent.[39] As Samir Amin has laid out in his recent publication dealing with the ‘Arab Spring’, notwithstanding the euphemistic and apologetic discourse of the Israeli state, the reality remains strongly reactionary: “In the territories conquered in 1967, Israel therefore instituted an apartheid system inspired by that of South Africa. Whenever it is accused of racism –which is absolutely obvious- Zionism responds, as usual, by systematically blackmailing its critics with accusations of anti-Semitism and exploitation of the Holocaust, as analyzed by Norman Finkelstein.”[40]

Next to merely mystifying historical sequences, one needs to raise awareness of the fact that it is often the specific (fascist) phantoms of European political history that are applied in the Zionist narrative in order to discredit any resistance vis-à-vis its colonial, and by extent imperial, design for the Middle East.[41] In his illuminating article entitled ‘The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers: Political “Backwardness” in Historical Perspective’, Ian Lustick has, for instance, keenly indicated that scholarly comparisons between the Middle East and Europe are often not only a-historical but more so hyper-subjective and thus ideological: “ […] these comparisons use Hitler and Mussolini, not Bismarck and Cavour, as referents; thus, Nasser was a ‘thin-horn Hitler’, a ‘Mussolini by the Nile”.[42] This ideological operation has ever since 9/11 proliferated flagrantly with less and less apologetic delusion. Analytically speaking, it is therefore no real surprise that the projection of power of both the United States and its main military ally in the Middle East have come along with attributing rather fantastical characteristics that relate in the first place to the cognitive realm of angst of their own populations. It is the acquisition of the latter’s consent and not that of those who are actually being oppressed that is of importance to the propaganda machinery.[43] The most difficult task within scholarship thus amounts to detecting and discrediting the discursive elements of such power projections. The same can be said for taking an intellectual stance with regards to such operations, especially within Western academia. This reality highlights academia’s complex relationship with the state and power in the abstract sense: as a key institution, it is often intrinsically embedded and intertwined with the state’s production of dominant narratives. Having said that, academia often also provides a specific space for sporadic counter-discursive action, stemming from the concentration of knowledge and critical thinking therein. However, scientific production and intellectual integrity are hitherto still two divergent matters in the world of academic scrutiny. It goes without saying that key elements of academia have consistently complied with the political class’s demand for intellectual alibis, even in the case of the most reactionary of scenarios. This is as much the case for American and European[44] academic circles, as it is for the Israeli intelligentsia –scholars like Ilan Pape, famous for his study entitled The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, are not even accepted in the country’s scientific margin.[45]  

While not seeking to debate the technical (military) precision of the above-mentioned statement of the Jewish Agency, it suffices to state that the inclusion of violent symbols into such a geographical depiction relates to a core feature of Israeli political discourse, which stereotypically characterizes Palestinians as inherently violent and aggressive. This ‘fact’ is of course reflexive because it reinforces the propagation that Israel, the only nuclear power in the entire Middle East, is a supposed beacon of enlightenment and democracy, next being existentially threatened. The prism of ‘national security’, together with the image, or rather stereotype of the ‘violent’ Palestinian-Arab ‘terrorist’ has, from the moment of the establishment of the state of Israel, consistently been applied as a binary to dually construct the Israeli Self. Such a twisted methodology presents Israel as a staunch but rather altruistic peace-seeking nation under constant threat[46] by the ‘uncivilized barbarians at gate’. In the wake of 9/11, the former has often been portrayed as deprived of any ‘serious’, that is, ‘rational’ negotiation partner. I would argue that such systematic representations of the entire Palestinian population as a violent, homogeneous Other are by themselves violent acts in the form of aggressive ideological categorizations. Various scholars have effectively analyzed the words of David Ben Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin and current Prime Minister Netanyahu to illustrate this dual Self-construction vis-à-vis the Other in extremis.[47] As migration scholar Robin Cohen has pointed out, such a logic runs along the regressive premises, or rather illusive slogan, that “we know who we are by who we reject”, or indeed relevant in Israel’s case “we know who we are by who we eject”.[48]

Edward Said’s main contribution within political philosophy came about via his key contribution entitled Orientalism, which mainly highlighted the epistemic functions that lay behind the erection of a superior Self within the colonial and post-colonial centers of political power. Moreover, contemporary critics like Hamid Dabashi claim that knowledge production with regard to the Middle East, especially in relation to hyped such conflicts as the Israeli-Palestinian one, still runs along such condescending lines, which represent more of an ideological monologue than sincere scientific attempts to critically assess dynamics in situ. Although many impressionistic scholars seem to think that subsequent to the work of intellectual pioneers like Said post-colonial scholarship had once and for all ended its objectifying and paternalistic scholarship in exchange for a positivistic revision of an ‘error’ -i.e. to supposedly portray the real Orient ‘truthfully’- reality evidently proves them wrong. Today the ranks of conservative scholarship have often merely opened up to ‘native informers’, but it has not altered the fabrication and reproduction of stereotypes and shallow symbolism that is easily capable of installing fear amongst the domestic public. Although it is today seldom articulated, much of the academic output treating Middle Eastern politics is highly ideological. To be clear, applying an ideological frame to analyze is not the mere issue here, it is the pretense of not doing so, which is commonplace and thus provoking. The main paradox is that many a scholar seems to be convinced of producing more objective knowledge than the previous generation, while in fact similarly patronizing meta-discourses are still consistently fabricated about, or rather projected onto, dehumanized subjects. Said’s comprehensive critique made him keenly wary of scholarly re-embedding into such hierarchic constellations of neo-colonial knowledge production within mainstream academia. He emblematically never consciously accepted the prescribed position and role of a ‘native informer’ for the sake of mere individual careerism.[49]

It is highly regrettable that Israeli political commentators continue to actively reduce the Palestinians’ humanity to a particular ‘essence’ that is either violent or unwanted within the societal fabric that is envisioned. The fact that Israeli political discourse articulates demography in a ‘racialized’ sense is detectable in the comments of Shimon Peres –the so-called ‘peace dove’- on the Israeli disengagement of Gaza: “Politics is a matter of demography, not geography”.[50] Although it might sound like a ‘technical’ comment, it is in fact quite an ideological one that is very illustrative for the ideological orientation and sinister realism of the Zionist enterprise. During whatever sort of reduction process, the ordinary Palestinian citizen and his voice is completely absent in Zionist description, for he does not fit into the pre-designed category of what it means to be ‘Palestinian’. They are thus trapped in the deep binary structure of the negative stereotype, as opposed to the cultivated, democratic Israeli Self. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, one can relate such discursive strategies to what the keen Slavoj Zizek has dubbed as the active ‘culturalization of politics’ by those in power, depleting actors of their human dimension and conflicts of their (often) material basis.[51] Especially following the end of the Cold War and the marginalization of historical-materialist critique, the cultural prism has up until this very moment known a booming success in various analytical disciplines.[52] However, attentive scholars have been repositioning themselves by advocating for analytical schemes that are based less on imaginative differentiation and more on egalitarian parameters. Only in relation to more structural analytics, can accompanying Humanist philosophy be adequately incorporated in daily governance:

“Until future research proves otherwise, we ought to take for granted only two basic human entities: individuals and all humanity. All entities between these two, save a mother and a newborn child, are arbitrary formations created by our perception of ourselves vis-à-vis others. … Various unifying factors, such as language, religion, and colour (sic.) of skin, seem ‘natural’. I propose that none is. Language, culture, a real or assumed historical origin, and religion, form identities for an ‘us’ in our minds, and only so long as they exist in our minds as unifying factors do the entities of ‘us’ persist.”[53] 

2.3 Palestinian Nationalism: The ‘Authentic’ Self & the Lack of Auto-Criticism

When inquiring Palestinian Self-representation, one swiftly notes that it has also constructed itself through a polarized binary opposition with a marginalized Other, which is often entirely excluded from visual projections of the notions of Homeland and Belonging. A projected map found on Palestinian activist blogs that was issued in the oPt during the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011, which reads in Arabic “The people want the end of the division”[54], serves as a good contemporary example of this practice. This slogan alludes explicitly to intra-Palestinian political divisions, and implicitly to the ethnic segregation in the region between Israelis and the confined Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank. However, when looking at the map in more detail, it only includes Arabic denotations for ancient Palestinians towns, villages and political movements (‘Palestine’, West Bank, Gaza, Hamas, Fatah, PFLP, DFLP etc.), thus radically excluding the Israeli reality, which is today a material fact. It could be argued that anti-colonial struggles against Zionism need not per se exclude the ordinary Israeli worker and citizen from a future vision, but rather effort to incorporate them into one based on equal rights and obligations. One can argue so due to the fact that it will most probably require the effort of substantial segments of both societies in order to overthrow the repressive contemporary constellation of fear and oppression.

Then there is of course the frequented image of the Palestinian female-farmer as a symbol for ‘authenticity’. Such imagery was often used by the PFLP during the Cold War era and is today often re-used by Palestinian activists and bloggers.[55] This particular imagery clearly functions a counter-discourse vis-à-vis the Israeli ‘Terra Nullius’ doctrine. For instance, if one observes carefully, one can notice that the shape of the women’s necklace displays the geographical space of British Mandate Palestine. Apart from their counter-discursive dimension, such projections can, however, also be problematic since ‘authenticity’ is in itself a construction that is generally made through the selection of a subjective historical departure point by an interest group embarking on its desired representation to the outer public. As such, in its endeavor to claim ‘existence’ and project the wish for self-determination, Palestinian national discourse often excludes the Israeli Other in a similarly contradictive binary of limitative cultural politics. This is especially the case in contemporary political discourse and popular visualizations of which the political messages are today often void of any substantial ideological underpinning. Other projections of ‘Palestinianess’ can easily be found elsewhere, for instance, within Arab prose, poetry and political manifestos in allusions to notions of Homeland and Exile. It was PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, who famously addressed the UN General Assembly in 1974 by stating: “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun; do not let the olive branch fall from my hand”. Hereby, one needs to understand the connotative symbolism of the olive branch in Palestinian folklore, being a symbol for peace, celebration, hope, nutritional survival, and ownership. Furthermore, one of the most famous Palestinian poets, Mahmud Darwish, wrote a poem that he named ‘Passport’ or ‘Jawaz Safar’ and which the famous Lebanese composer, Marcel Khalife, put into a song. This song carries multiple implicit references to the experience of refuge and the persistent denial of return by the Israeli authorities. The signifier of ‘Passport’ hence acquires an entirely additional, connotative dimension, next to its mere legal-formal definition. In his numerous poetic compilations, Mahmud Darwish has diligently, and self-critically applied beautiful words to depict the complexities, realities and contradictions that lie behind the notions of Belonging (cf. “be a narcissist if you need to be”).[56] By highlighting and objectifying the discursive mechanisms used by both Israeli and Palestinian actors, depicting the desired Self through a reduction and rejection of the Other, one is also bound to detect their paradoxical similarities.

It has been pointed out that even amongst post-colonial scholarship that is rather concerned with the ‘Palestinian cause’, many have tended to shy away from posing structural questions, i.e. falling short of challenging colonization and occupation processes as intertwined phenomena. Today, many critical voices seem in fact latently willing to accommodate Zionism’s structural claim that Israel is inherently and righteously ‘Jewish’. This is apologetically justified by simultaneous support for the Palestinians’ effort to erect their own Homeland along side Israel. The same dynamic has been present amongst Israeli scholars who have been fairly critical of Israeli Right-wing policies, but have nevertheless retained that Zionism is in itself legitimate. However, both on the practical and analytical level this by now conventional logic is flawed and will render progress void for it overlooks Zionism’s basic colonial parameters and modern genealogy –enshrined within European romantic nationalist doctrine, with a co-opted flair of religious sentiment to arouse stronger ideological appeal. Such a faulty understanding is based on limited historical knowledge and interprets the contemporary occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem along with the blockade of Gaza as mere temporary side effects of Israel’s ‘security policy’ rather than as integral to its very foundational state ideology, which justifies such arbitrary regulations of both people and territory under ‘Jewish’ control in the first place. As Zionism is hitherto still the guiding ideology of the state of Israel, and as the latter is still one of the main protagonists of Middle Eastern politics, its political philosophy should surely be taken into account in any discussion pertaining to it. Instead of ignoring the issue, which would amount to intellectual capitulation, one could address it and furthermore advocate for constitutional egalitarianism across the various communitarian cages (‘Israelis’, ‘Palestinians’, ‘Jews’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Christians’, ‘Arabs’ etc.) as a lens for conflict assessment and possible resolution. Such an egalitarian strategy does not stand by itself by a mere sterile reference to abstract ‘human rights’ under a thin guise of naïve altruism, but should rather go hand in hand with comprehensively tackling Israel’s colonialist and discriminatory ideological parameters altogether. Such an approach is in fact intellectually sounder than calling for Palestinian micro nationalism, which is today often proposed by the ranks of conservative neo-colonial scholarship or even impressionistic activism, for that matter.[57] Such reactionary derivates of thought and action, be it deliberate or rather unconscious, are detrimental to interests of the general population in the Southern Levant and merely seem to increase the legitimacy of the PNA, which has hitherto at least partly functioned as a comprador elite that co-manages the colonial design in the Levantine topography without  any democratic legitimacy.[58] Questions of legitimacy, representation, governance, and nationalism clearly converge when reflecting on both the Palestinian and Israeli status quo. The diligent wordings of Frantz Fanon’s 1961’s Les Damnés de la Terre, or The Wretched of the Earth, still resonate as highly relevant and applicable today:

“A bourgeoisie that provides nationalism alone as food for the masses fails in its mission and gets caught up in a whole series of mishaps. But if nationalism is not made explicit and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a blind alley. The bourgeois leaders of under-developed countries imprison national consciousness in sterile formalism. […] the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein.”[59]

The subtle normative regime of ‘methodological nationalism’ in the social sciences, along with the global political climate –dubbed as ‘post-politics’ by scholars such as Slavoj Zizek- have generated an overall context in which the vigorous analytical paradigm of settler-colonial studies has remained strikingly undervalued.[60] Moreover, applying such a prism would also enable scholars to look into the broader structural context of the broader region. This is important because the very geostrategic position and relevance of the militarized state of Israel cannot fully be understood through mere reference to such local markers as the PLO, PNA, or the historical British Mandate for Palestine, for that matter. These are mere superficial denotations that hardly serve as a proper structural antithesis; they do not whatsoever rationalize Israel marriage to the global capital and its solid integration into the global political complex. In fact, due to the Greater Middle East’s (GME) key geostrategic position within the commodity driven global economy –one that is still largely based on fossil fuels, and dominated by capital-abundant advanced industries such as the US, Japan and the EU- the broader specificities of the region need to be kept in mind when analyzing socio-political dynamics in one of its pockets.[61] Without controversy, Samir Amin’s sober but structural understanding can be abided to: “To carry on with its project, Israel requires an Arab world weakened as much as possible at all levels”.[62] Furthermore, this regional constellation of fragmented conflict is stipulated and incentivized by a military-industrial complex headed formally by the US government to secure the control and steady flow of fossil fuels to such advanced markets for the benefit of consumer viability, large scale profitability and capital accumulation therein.[63]

Not all is oblivious, there have been comprehensive and appealing attempts in the activist field, such as the law-based ‘Call for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions’ (BDS) movement, which has also activated some segments of local Palestinian and global academia to declare an ‘academic boycott’ of non-cooperation with Israeli universities.[64] Claiming equal rights, and targeting the Israeli project along settler-colonial analytics does require some adequate will to position oneself intellectually, along with a great deal of self-criticism and reflection. It often requires intellectual ‘exile’ from academic normative conventions, individual departure from internalized nationalist conceptions, and principled exclamation to any manifest overconsumption and misuse of authority or power.[65] Such an altered state of consciousness and bottom-up counter-discourse is mandatory from both the Arab-Palestinian as well as the inherently diverse Israeli public, if the Kafkaesque nature of the entire conflict is to be unveiled for the benefit of moving beyond the instigated play of ‘nations’ and angst.[66] Scholars like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said have since long understood that social justice and the easing of suffering can only be comprehensively be overcome through reconciliatory projects of ‘bi-directional’ solidarity, or ‘egalitarian bi-national socialism’ across the various constituencies. In the meantime, however, the current status quo of encroaching colonialism in the Southern Levant is often flagrantly presented under the mere euphemism of a ‘political deadlock’ within a stalled ‘peace process’.[67] The discrepancy between rhetoric and dynamics on the ground could in fact not be more surreal. One can legitimately highlight the appalling inconsistencies within the discourses that speak of so-called US-mediated ‘peace’ initiatives, when taking into account the latter’s Machiavellian projection of power in the GME from the mid 1950s onward. Countering such a distorted portrayal of events does not only amount to unveiling and discrediting it, while trying to re-identify more accurate sequences and factors that brought about and continue to reproduce the contemporary constellation of conflict in the region, but, more importantly, to possibly theorizing, advocating, and activating progressive departure from the reactionary status quo. On the one hand, structural factors of political economy do not whatsoever constitute the entirety of social ‘reality’; one can simultaneously apply unlimited postmodern paradigms that unveil and endeavor to grasp divergent, social, cultural, psychological, and subaltern realities, for instance. Yet, on the other hand, parameters of political economy should not a-priori be left out of analyses deliberately, i.e. ideologically, unless rationally substantiated due to a particular research design.[68]

In order to depart from this reactionary status quo, the passive and ‘caged’ constituents on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian ‘spectacle’ would need sensitization and mobilization –not least via auto-criticism- since the socio-political configuration of either society is in this case intrinsically linked to that of the other.[69] Palestinian emancipation movements should be wary of Zionism’s basic ideological operation of transposing its modes of thinking onto the entirety of agents that it manifestly or latently regulates: hyper-nationalism, racism, segregation and civic discrimination should not be the corner stones for forthcoming Palestinian liberation. A more comprehensive approach would constitute basal calls for full-fledged civic inclusion and participation, along with constitutional egalitarianism (for various minorities), in a shared polity.[70] To be clear and mitigate against any ambiguity here, this not a call for abstract ‘multiculturalism’ –an amalgamated conception and corner-stone of various (divergent) ideological (neo-conservative, social-democratic) discourses that is by now inherently problematic or even bankrupt altogether- but rather one for social justice based on a clear set of humanitarian ideals that can be translated into specific legalistic documents, material institutions and top-down (incorporative) policies.[71] How would the large minority of Palestinian-Arabs with Israeli IDs benefit from an ‘independent’ micro-state in the West Bank or even in Gaza -one that might as well grow out to be as authoritarian as almost any other Arab state in the region? In fact, rigid nationalism avoids the core call for comprehensive civic rights that many of the Palestinian public ultimately long for, whether living in Israel proper or elsewhere the topography under Israeli military and economic control. In the end various segments of Palestinian descent are confronted with limitations and infringements on their basic rights to attain equal treatment and footing in legislative terms; the solution to this problematique should hence be adequate. If not, then what is to be proposed: ‘population transfers’, further division of land, and even stricter forms of physical segregation along supposedly truly ‘homogenous’ groups on each side? The use of mere narrow ‘identity-based’ intellectual paradigms and political discourses are quite extant today, but not whatsoever satisfactory. Amin Maalouf, a renown French-Lebanese, psychoanalyst and writer, conveyed his intellectual aversion and personal agitation for this particular rationale and contemporary social mentality quite eloquently in his study entitled In the Name of Identity, by uttering: “What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself?”.[72]

The late Edward Said was one of the few who applied self-criticism to such an extent that it became a prerequisite for Palestinian liberation, even during widely celebrated ‘spectacles’ such as the 1993 Oslo Accords. He saw the presence of reflexive criticism as a necessary duality for the politics of comprehensive emancipation. One cannot claim to confine ‘solidarity’ to nationalism –under the auspices of ‘political pragmatism’- without infringing on critical faculties. As a secular critic, Said managed to consistently negate methodological nationalism in a manner that few have managed to emulate.[73] Samir Amin has furthermore pointed out that the bias of latent nationalism in (even critical) scholarship has nevertheless been dominant within reality in the entire Arab political sphere, as Arab public opinion has hitherto generally remained confined to either populist nationalism or political conservatism (‘political Islam’), without managing to comprehensively challenge nor transcend this primary intellectual calamity.[74] The selective and apologetic application of criticism within such scholarship has come to the fore in the form of the ‘Occidentalism’ trap, widely occurring when reviewing Orientalist scholarship in equally essentializing and patronizing manners. In such cases, intellectual inconsistency inevitably leads to the reproduction of regressive bias. It is in this very manner that ‘theory travels’: nationalist ideology and its derived reactionary practices are clearly not ‘people’ nor time specific, and, alas, certainly well-represented in the Palestinian national endeavor.[75]

If global disinformation campaigns that manufacture consent for both Israel and the PNA’s projects of division and identity politics are to be halted, then it is up to those who occupy intellectual positions in society to mark the lack of ethics therein and to conceive of new methodologies that could enact comprehensive change for the benefit of all the inhabitants of the Israeli-Palestinian topography.[76] As French critic Guy Debord tried to stipulate in his key study entitled The Society of the Spectacle, intellectual labor, political embedding, and social action are not to be separated artificially as their inherent interdependence would inevitably lead to manifest contradictions in both intellectual narrative and socio-political action alike:

“In the language of contradiction, the critique of culture is a unified critique, in that it dominates the whole of culture –its knowledge as well as its poetry- and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique of the social totality. This unified theoretical critique is on its way to meet unified social practice”.[77]

Intellectual consistence and progressive political vision is needed if Israel’s settler-colonial project is to be exposed, and if Zionism’s intellectual operation of generating global consent for its undertaking, in the name of identity and on account of imperial authority, is to be tackled comprehensively. The intellectual remedy for settler-colonialism should not amount to a paradoxical reflex of mere caged Palestinian nationalism, but rather to gradual cross-national solidarity that advocates for basal constitutional egalitarianism.[78] Indeed, a critique of historical Zionist posters of propaganda and their dialectic alternation over time has inevitably led to one of ‘culture’ and its wider politico-discursive manifestations in both contemporary Israeli and Palestinian society.

3. Conclusion: Caged Politics of Identity as the Dialectic Pedigree of a Settler-Colonial Conflict

Through reference to various historical and contemporary examples, this paper has effectively alerted the reader of the ensuing ‘politics of representation’ pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many of the projected layers of exclusive ‘differences’ therein, whether formulated historically by ‘race’ or contemporarily by ‘ethnicity’, ‘religion’, and ‘culture’, can be traced back to romantic doctrines of national Belonging and mere apreciative categories of supposed superiority. Such categorizations are hence no objective markers to structure the reality of conflict in situ, but constitute rather the ideological jargon of conflict itself. These notions of ‘difference’ are furthermore no mere abstractions in contemporary Israel and the oPt since they are actively legalized in the daily reality of two opposing political projects. In effect, the cited ‘Visit Palestine’ posters, which have travelled through time and acquired different cognitive coding from contemporary circles of Palestinian grassroot activists, form integral part of a much wider collision of political and epistemic contestation. Albeit using formally similar imagery and being rather asymetrical within the equation, such advocay constitutes opposition to the ensuing settler-colonial project in the southern Levant. It forms part of a visual culture of emancipatory resistance by intelligently exposing the very colonial nature of the Zionist project. The reassertation of such historical Zionist propaganda demonstrates altogether the understated function and ongoing importance of the discursive dimensions of conflict. The keen effort of Palestinian activists to sell and expose these Orientalist looking posters to both conscious and unconscious publics (tourists) in the oPt alerts one of the advanced political strategies that are present in contemporary Palestinian society’s intelluectual engagement with the Zionist epistemic machinery that has become so dominant within global mainstream discourse.

It has long been pointed out that Israeli mythology culminates around distortive ideas of rigid ‘Jewish homogeneity’ and biblical entitlement of what has ideologically been delineated as ‘Erez Israel’. The democratic Self that Israel has so come to acclaim has ever since 1948 been constructed in opposition to any convenient Arab-Palestinian binary, preferably inherently violent and irrational. Yet, it less often pointed out that elements of Palestinian national discourse often tend to overstretch into equally romantic notions and imageries of radical and exclusive ‘authenticity’ along with conservative claims of a-priori entitlement to (‘holy’) land. For the sake of retaining to an accurate and progressive debate, such self-centered inflations need strict analytical separation from more legitimate politico-material claims and initiatives of Palestinian-Arab emancipation that target the very foundations and ongoing proliferation of the Israeli settler-colonial project in the historical British Mandate for Palestine (West Bank, Gaza & Israel). It can be argued that the mythological fabrications within Palestinian nationalism, along with political discourses that solely focus on the creation of separate Palestinian state, pay latent tribute to the settler-colonial legacy of Zionism, and its intellectual romantic imagery, as a shared dialectic pedigree. Having said that, however, the material reality in this political topography of the Southern Levant still amounts more to a scheme of colonial exploitation than a political conflict of mere competing forms of nationalism. In effect, Zionism is still the dominant and empowered ideology in situ. Moreover, it is the very state ideology of the overarching structure of power, which has been legalized and militarized in every inch of the former British Mandate for Palestine. Indeed, the latter configuration continues to have vast legal implications for its ‘minorities’, which it continues to manifestly and latently segregate and discriminate within the deliberately fragmented territory under its control (voting, civic participation, land titles etc.).

A comprehensive reading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a settler-colonial one affects any further discussion concerning more specific socio-political dynamics in the region, for it would propose decolonization, anti-colonial emancipation, and egaliterian (constitutional) liberation -along the lines of a political confederation- as solutions to generate social change, and not deliberately euphemistic and ambigue recipes such as mere political ‘settlement’ or abstract ‘peace’. The latter analytical assumption is thus a basal one that ties in with scholarly ontology. Debating micro-political matters whilst shying away from structure ammounts often to intellectual capitulation to dominant Zionist rationale, for within the entirety of the intellectual-discursive equation in academia it will contribute to apologetically freeing the settler-colonial project from assuming any actual responsability for its destructive operation. Such evasive scholarship often forms part of the top-down manufacturing of reactionary consent. The topic of Israel-Palestine has been widely debated, but seldomly does one encounter sound, profound and consistent argumentation. The few distinct but more comprehensive intellectual efforts have instead chosen to target the exploitative class structures and the misguiding nationalist rhetoric present within both societies. The latter inclusive approach envisions the sort of incorporative progress that is based on a methodology focusing on shared rights rather than on a vilified Other. Advocating for tightly segregated Homelands as a recipe for progress ignores the fact that the persistence of Zionism, to whomever public confined, will continue to dictate colonial repression, segregation and exploitation by ideological nature; certainly so in view of its acquired military empowerment. Instead of erecting more boundaries, both physical and psychological ones, one could advocate for their abolishment for the benefit of all relevant inhabitants. While the latter are hitherto still trapped in anxious behavior and neurotic political submission, innumerable commentators continue 1) to manufacture consent for the ongoing colonization of the West Bank by the Israeli authorities, 2) to understate the subtle collaboration scheme of the PNA as a comprador client to co-manage certain colonial cages of Palestinian-Arab populations, or for that matter, 3) to avoid addressing Israel’s structural, imperial penetration and (military) supervision of the surrounding Arab, inter-state complex in the Middle East, hosting vast quantities of some of the world’s most precious primary resources and commodities (fossil fuels).

By example of the ‘Visit Palestine’ campaign, one is visually alerted of the fact that both people and ideology have travelled through both space and time in the Euro-Mediterranean topography, cynically generating and reproducing nefarious lines of thought and political practices in a dialectic manner. However, these actions and proliferating constellations have also ignited more comprehensive humanitarian calls and ideas among various segments of regional and global society, along with sparking genuinely creative initiatives in the subaltern culture of contemporary Palestinian resistance to the settler-colonial design in the Southern Levant.



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JAAFAR ALLOUL - 04 JUNE 2012

ABSTRACT Sectarian Otherness has intentionally been made integral to Arab political discourse ever since the 2003 implosion of Ba’thi Iraq and the subsequent emergence of a delicate power vacuum in the Persian Gulf. Furthermore, pertaining rumours of a supposed Iranian-led ‘Shiite Crescent’ or ‘Shiite Revival’ need foremost to be interpreted as top-down instigated forms of propaganda (identity politics), ultimately serving the isolation of the Iranian nation-state -the main beneficiary of the 2003 Iraq War. Today, the sectarian narrative has clearly taken a strong hold on Middle Eastern media concerns and popular consciousness –even detectable during Arab media coverage of the ‘Arab Spring’ (Bahrain, Tunisia) in 2010/2011- by which the very idea of an Iranian-led ‘Shiʿa Crescent’ has quickly spread to global academia. There is, however, a clear but understated correlation between geopolitical friction within OPEC, the Iraqi refugee debacle and the distortive sectarian decharge of the region’s key US-aligned powerhouses.

Introduction

Although some studies relating to Middle Eastern sectarian politics have mentioned that wide scale, Iranian-orchestrated conversion to Shiism is more of a politically inflated myth than a proven societal reality, many have seemingly failed to consider the impact of post-war, Iraqi Shiite migration together with Iraq’s altered positioning within the OPEC cartel as more substantial incentives and societal pretexts for such politicized claim of Shiʿa proselytism in the region.[1] The Iraqi refugee crisis is a serious concern though; the United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees alarmingly reported in 2007 that:

“An estimated 60,000 Iraqis are being forced to leave their homes every month by continuing violence. As of September 2007, there were believed to be well over 4 million displaced Iraqis around the world including some 2.2 million inside Iraq and a similar number in neighbouring countries (in particular Syria and Jordan) and some 200,000 further afield. Around one million were displaced prior to 2003. UNHCR’s April 2007 Conference on Iraqi displacement focused attention on the huge humanitarian crisis developing in the region.”[2]

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq has generated one of the largest refugee flows in decades. In a historical perspective, it is regionally comparable to the consecutive Palestinian refugee flows all over the Middle East (1948, 1967, 1991[3]). Although the Iraqi refugee problem has historical precedents (Iran-Iraq war, 1990 Gulf war), the 2003 Iraq War and the subsequent insurgency have led to an unprecedented mass displacement in the Middle East. Indications given by UNHCR testify the vast increase in refugees to their concern in the region ever since the inception of the US-led invasion.[4] By 2007, about 15 percent of the Iraqi population was displaced, either internally (IDP) or extra-territorially (‘refugees’), mounting up to an enormous total of around four million displaced Iraqis on the move due to existential insecurity. An estimated two million of them had either sought refuge in neighbouring Jordan or Syria, increasing the populations of those countries by respectively 15 and 7 per cent. Notwithstanding the magnitude of this humanitarian crisis, the event has been typed by a discursive silence, i.e. it was vastly and actively ignored by consecutive US policymakers and generally under-covered by the global media. This has consequently had the disastrous effect of only generating a minimal and actually insufficient degree of humanitarian relief for these displaced Iraqi masses.[5]

A 2008 UNHCR report indicated Jordan in particular as the second largest host country to absorb Iraqi refugees, that is, in registered cumulative numbers.[6] UNHCR reports estimated the total number of Iraqi refugees in Jordan exceeding half a million, up to 750,000 in 2007.[7] In the immediate years after the US-led invasion of Iraq (2004-2005) Jordan had in fact been the country with the highest amount of Iraqi visa applications, at least implying the physical presence of an enormous amount of displaced Iraqis –some passing through on their way to Syria.[8] These dramatic numbers only reflect official statistics, but in such a post-war chaos, it must have undoubtedly concerned even higher numbers (clandestine refuge). Additionally, a 2007 UNHCR report indicated that the amount of submitted Iraqi asylum applications in extra-regional, industrialized countries hit a crucial low point in 2003 and its immediate subsequent years (2007), implying, again, an enormous regional concentration of asylum refuge, for over a period of roughly three to four years.[9] Hereby, one should realize that 2004 was the year of Jordanian king Abdullah’s famous coining of the controversial term ‘Shiʿa Crescent’ (al-Hilāl ash-Shīʿī’)[10] during one of his media interviews; an alleged ‘Shiite Expansion/Tide’ (al-Madd ash-Shīʿī) was propagated as a creeping danger that might split up the Arab and ‘Muslim World’, altering the ‘traditional’ Sunni-dominated make-up of the Middle East.[11]

Interestingly, this vague conception of unifying ‘radical Shiite’ polities was soon popularized among other autocratic establishments in the region –which have increasingly been referred to as the ‘moderate Sunni Arab’ states by Western academics and political commentators.[12] The now imprisoned Husni Mubarak of Egypt reportedly stated in a 2006 interview with the Al Arabiya satellite news channel that “Shiʿa in the region are mainly loyal to Iran and not to their own states”.[13] In that same year, a former security advisor to the Saudi King Abdullah was quoted as saying that Saudi Arabia had “the religious responsibility to intervene” in Iraq because the country was “the birthplace of Islam and the de facto leader of the world's Sunni community”.[14] Additionally, Saudi king Abdullah himself has reportedly accused Iran for masterminding the proselytizing of predominantly ‘Sunni countries’ in the Middle East (e.g. Syria). In March 2009, Moroccan authorities allegedly cut their diplomatic ties with Iran, claiming a Tehran-led wave of proselytism in the North African kingdom. Hence, an amalgamating trend of blending sectarianism with political motive for the sake of regime-survival had set off –a deceptive strategy, still in use during the contemporary popular uprisings coded as the ‘Arab Spring’ (e.g. Bahrain, Tunisia).[15]

Opposition in the Gulf: Iraq’s OPEC Potential & Saudi Cartel Hegemony

Iraq has ever since 2003 been depicted as one of the main loci of a regional sectarian struggle by various Middle Eastern policy makers, media outlets, clerics and academics. This country has been portrayed as if it was encroached by a regional ideological ‘clash’, between Sunni and Shiite populations both backed by supposed kingpins of a greater intra-Islamic conflict unfolding in the region. However, an inquiry into more structural dynamics (material motives) sheds a different light on contemporary events that are manifest in Iraq and the Gulf region. The Iraqi factor for regional discontent, threat perception and subsequent hegemonic rivalry is directly economically related. Whereas ‘Palestine’ –alluding to Iranian interference in the Levant (Hizbullah, Hamas)- is to a certain extent a symbolic and diplomatic matter[16], Iraq’s strategic geographic locus and the riches bulking beneath its surface are not.[17] Today, oil is a vital source of income for all rentier-based economies in the Gulf region and crude petrol is still one of the most important energy sources and market commodities of the 21st century. In this sense Iraq is not merely the scenery of sectarian induced violence, the country is also holder to one[18] of the largest conventional oil reserves in the world, a substantial member of the OPEC cartel and geographically situated at the very heart of the world’s largest oil exporting region, namely the Persian Gulf. In contrast to other places around the globe (e.g. Russian Caspian Sea, Venezuelan Amazon) and similar to its larger Saudi neighbour –the current arbiter of the global oil market– its reserves are relatively easy and cheap to exploit. In this respect, Iraq was not merely a former dictatorship where the ‘tyrant’ Saddam –strangely, a former ‘Sunni’ protector[19] in the contemporary Saudi (sectarian) logic- was altruistically ‘toppled’ by the world most capable military force to install a heaven of ‘democracy’; in the geo-economic realm Iraq signifies ‘black gold’.[20]

The removal of Saddam and the installation of a (formally) pro-US government in Iraq –whether allegedly ‘Shiʿa’ or not– had initially rendered the US administration, which represents a domestic US market[21] consuming one fourth of the world’s oil production[22] while harbouring only a marginal percentage of global reserves[23], significantly more grip on the global energy market. Through its control of Iraq, Washington also gained more influence vis-à-vis the bargaining power of OPEC (Saudi Arabia, Iran) and it simultaneously provided the US with crucial leverage over its major industrial rivals (Europe, China, India).[24] It is within this context crucial to realize that certain Arab OPEC countries have since long played a key role in Western economic progress and viability in times of recession through the steady flow of favourably cheap oil; not least the Gulf monarchies. This relationship has known various shifting dynamics over time. In the 1970s, for example, imperial Iran was still a key US-aligned energy giant. Structuralism aside, today, Gulf states their own share of revenue has substantially grown in contrast to colonial and early post-colonial times (‘Seven Sisters’)[25] thus rendering them to a certain extent more independent political and economic power. This does, however, not mean a simultaneous increase of the redistribution of wealth on a national level, nor a liberalization of the domestic political process. Moreover, up until this day, the US had not been able to ensure the desired stability of crude oil prices.[26]

The new Maliki-led government of Iraq has clearly been desperate for oil revenues to assure the questionable viability of the malfunctioning Iraqi nation state. Although its petroleum infrastructure needs extensive upgrading and is in fact highly dependent on foreign companies, its increasing export capacity will nevertheless further pressure the existing production quota and revenues of its OPEC neighbours.[27] It is hereby worthy to mention that in 2008 a unity coalition was formed in the Iraqi parliament that went across confessional lines to re-initiate the state’s management of its precious recourses. Thus, interestingly, when it comes to the oil-economy the supposedly engrained sectarian dichotomy was easily overcome.[28] Both OPEC giants Saudi Arabia and Iran have been increasing their rivalry over Iraq ever since the US started loosing its firm grip on internal affairs from the mid-2000s onwards (insurgency). The implosion of Bathist Iraq and Taliban-led Afghanistan has made some scholars to suggest the ‘Rise of Iran’ as a regional power, in favour of Saudi Arabia’s regional aspirations.[29] Both Riyadh and Tehran have of course since long been strong competitors in the oil business –this even applies to pre-revolutionary Iran- because of their distinctive national make-up (consumption) and diverging external market strategy. Their disparity also results from a difference in oil reserves. Whereas contemporary Iranian reserves are estimated at 136 billion barrels, Saudi Arabia is reported to host a tantalizing 267 billion barrels in oil reserves. Moreover, the Saudi cost of extraction a barrel is estimated at $2 to $3 while Iran’s production costs weigh up to $15 a barrel, mainly due to sectoral inefficiency.[30] Through this favourable position, Riyadh has over the years become the new financial strongman of the Arab world (and the GCC), further enabling it to exert increasing control over pan-Arab media outlets, whilst simultaneously assuring the strategic backing of the region’s key external power, the United States. Subsequent to the First Gulf War, the US had turned to Riyadh to counter Iran’s hegemonic aspirations in the Gulf. Today, Riyadh hence enjoys considerable diplomatic capabilities and it has established a somehow different relation to the US than other US-aligned Arab states.[31] To use the accurate words of the senior lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, Dr. Larbi Sadiki: “Saudi Arabia’s renting role gives it more of an equal exchange with the US: oil in return for petro-dollars and arms. Egypt and Jordan do not possess of that equal exchange: they rent their ‘mediatory’ role in return for US aid and favor.”[32] 

Today, Iranian strategists clearly take interest in maximizing oil profits in the near-term, as they do not believe their export reserves to last that long, mainly due to the accelerating pace of domestic consumption. While Tehran actively lobbies for higher global market prices within OPEC and is utterly pleased during favourable global market disruptions (e.g. Libyan ‘Arab Spring’ insurgency, 2011), the Saudis, on the other hand, are more concerned about the long-term prospect since they harbour such vast amounts of oil, have a lower demography and a less energy-intensive (industrial) economy. Significantly, they also seek to temper the industrialized world’s push for alternative energy sources and tend to lower extreme global market prices in a bid to ensure their long-term rentier income. It is of course no coincidence that Saudi Arabia together with other Gulf states have repeatedly blocked UNFCCC[33] summits that deal with implementing global measures to reduce carbon emissions in an effort to tackle global warming.[34]

High oil revenues for Iran imply high government subventions to handle the enormous post-revolutionary youth bulge; in Iran, domestic (socio-economic) frustrations are met with fuel subsidies. Therefore, the viability of Iran’s establishment is quite strongly dependent on the country’s positioning within international oil and gas markets. Any prospect that could broker more lucrative revenues is thus actively pursued. Today, the US does not only pressure the regime in Tehran through economic sanctions but also maintains a consistent military grip on Iran –the country is virtually surrounded by US military bases.[35] Therefore, any global action that is taken to target these central Iranian sectors is interpreted by Tehran as a direct assault on the country’s viability. Iran’s recent threats (January 2012) to close down the Strait of Hormuz as a reply to US and EU-enforced bans on Iranian-produced oil imports are embedded in this context.[36] This clearly signals Iran’s underlying problem of economic sternness, related to its inability to attract major Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) over the years, which is of course inasmuch due to internationally imposed sanctions, mainly from the part of G8 member states.[37] In this sense, pushing for a civil nuclear capacity –a de facto legal right under the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT)- would imply a diversification of national energy consumption, a more sustainable export capacity and even a margin to develop a competitive petro-chemical industry in the medium-term -a strategy, which Iraqi officials already envisaged in the 1970s. It is worth mentioning that the latter rationale is almost never discussed in contemporary media coverage surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. The country seems rather to be portrayed as an irrational (‘fundamentalist’) and warmongering state seeking to acquire and apply weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Rational policy, based on economic motive, seems to fall blank here.[38] Current Israeli president Shimon Peres is a passionate supporter of such logic and uses reference to Iran’s ‘future bomb’ quite systematically in his discussions of the Palestinian affairs.[39]

It is worthy to point out that although agreements were made within OPEC to ensure considerable profit for all cartel members, US-backed Saudi Arabia has shown hegemonic tendencies to dominate the organization –it harbours of course by far the largest reserves. Riyadh occasionally alters the cartel’s official market strategy by unilaterally endorsing overproduction. It has done so as early as 1985.[40] The Saudis have become renowned for their diplomatic management of global oil supply. By instantaneously bringing their idle capacity on stream, they have numerously filled in global disruptions (Iranian Revolution, Iran-Iraq War, 2003 Venezuelan political crisis, fractious Nigerian elections and recent Iraq War). Riyadh has ever since gotten more efficient and assertive in conducting its management role. In the past, oil crises did often have a nefarious impact on the global economy. The latest example of such market management was interestingly made just recently when Saudi officials agreed to produce more oil than their OPEC-entitled quota during the 2010-2011 popular uprisings in the Arab world. This assuring move immediately mitigated speculation and stabilized oil prices. By doing so, they made up for the Libyan deficit, (from their part) safeguarded US and EU economic recovery efforts and, interestingly, moderated (excessive) Iranian profits. Such market management demonstrates Riyadh’s very relationship with the industrialized world, i.e. its geopolitical ‘alignment’.[41] An article published on the website of The Economist on March 3, 2011 accurately reported this global dynamic and underlying structure:

“There are good reasons to worry. The Middle East and North Africa produce more than one-third of the world’s oil. Libya’s turmoil shows that a revolution can quickly disrupt oil supply. Even while Muammar Qaddafi hangs on with delusional determination and Western countries debate whether to enforce a no-fly zone, Libya’s oil output has halved, as foreign workers flee and the country fragments. The spread of unrest across the region threatens wider disruption. […] The markets’ reaction has been surprisingly modest. The price of Brent crude jumped 15% as Libya’s violence flared up, reaching $120 a barrel on February 24th. But the promise of more production from Saudi Arabia pushed the price down again. It was $116 on March 2nd—20% higher than the beginning of the year, but well below the peaks of 2008. Most economists are sanguine: global growth might slow by a few tenths of a percentage point, they reckon, but not enough to jeopardise the rich world’s recovery.”[42]

Moreover, other contemporary reports show that Riyadh preferred not to announce its wilfulness publicly due to “the political sensitivities in the region and the internal dynamics of OPEC”.[43] Interestingly, it was furthermore reported on June 2011 that OPEC was unable to reach a new quota-agreement on global oil supply. The Libyan oil crisis seems to have hit the very core of OPEC’s intra-cartel oppositions. At the time being, Riyadh (backed by Kuwait and the UAE) agreed –on a platform with key industrialized nations in Vienna- to increase their supply while other key OPEC countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Iran and none less than Iraq obstructed such a commitment. While Riyadh wanted to set the crude oil price at a fixed $80 per barrel, the other members lobbied to keep it well above $100 a barrel. These remarkable contemporary dynamics highlight the very issue that is at stake regarding Iraq’s future positioning within the OPEC cartel. Interestingly, it appears that Iraq is currently favouring the more extreme (short-term) Iranian strategy. In this context, it is no wonder that Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, was quoted saying that they “were unable to reach an agreement; it is one of the worst meetings we have ever had”.[44] It is in fact no secret that Saudi Arabia uses its unique position within the oil market to engage Iran geopolitically, seeking its own US-sponsored hegemony in the Gulf. Riyadh damages Iran’s national budget as a weapon in their geopolitical quarrel. Nawaf Obaid, a former security advisor of the current Saudi monarch, even literally stated so in an article that he wrote for the Washington Post in 2006:

“Finally, Abdullah may decide to strangle Iranian funding of the [Iraqi and Lebanese] militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending. But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today's high prices. The result would be to limit Tehran's ability to continue funnelling hundreds of millions each year to Shiite militias in Iraq and elsewhere.” [45]

     The latest of such moves came in January 2012, when the US was seen tightening the global embargo on Iran’s central bank –thus blocking its domestic means to sell oil abroad- and when Saudi Arabia reportedly announced that it would make up for any Iranian shortfall in oil supply, hence diligently complementing Washington’s efforts to isolate Tehran globally and domestically. In response, Iran warned Arab Gulf States not to endorse overproduction or “face unspecified ‘consequences”’, referring to its navy-exercises in the Strait of Hormuz.[46] Clearly, intra-cartel rivalry between the two most potent powers within OPEC has grown out to be quite explicit and this ever more highlights the importance of Iraq’s recovering, intermediary position. The geopolitical rivalry between GCC member states and Iran has also been ventilated during Arab Spring demonstrations in Gulf monarchies. Hereby, domestic political opposition was actively linked to an Iranian inflicted ‘Shiite Threat’. The Al Arabiya news channel reported on April 7, 2011 that “Ahmed al-Jarallah, editor-in-chief of the Kuwaiti daily newspaper al-Sayessah [sic.] accused Iran Wednesday [April 6, 2011] of inciting a Shiite revolution in the Gulf region” –ignoring any relation to other Arab countries and their relatively secular-based demands for inclusive democracy and socio-economic justice. The report further mentioned that “Jarrallah cited the example of Bahrain and accused Iranian agents inside the Gulf nation of organizing strikes and protests to destabilize national security and cripple the economy”. The chief-editor was literally quoted saying: “We saw ministers disappearing and managers of big service companies running away or joining the protests. This was Iran’s doing.”[47] Such allegations went together with more politicized accusations (Iranian ‘spy rings’) –Iranian meddling is surely possible since it has such a capacity, similar to any substantial nation state, but that is not the argument here. Significantly, such formal allegations went along with a regulated restriction of foreign media coverage in Gulf countries such as Kuwait and Bahrain.[48] One can legitimately argue that such national, class-based emancipation processes relate foremost to legal, social and economic integration efforts of marginalized segments of Gulf societies into their respective nation states (key reference), rather than a pressing for any cultural rapprochement of Arab Shiites (‘Shi’a Crescent’) with their Persian counterparts. Even Iranian political patronage is often overstated. Ever since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the former’s abandonment of trying to export its revolution (internal focus, realpolitik) and Gulf nations their inclusive nation-building efforts in the 1990s (wataniyya/citizenship), both transnational paramilitary and political ties have gradually been dissolved.[49] However, when Riyadh intervened in Bahrain on March 2011 by sending in Saudi troops, officials of both countries consistently refused to consider that the Bahraini uprising was rather secular and primarily class-based.[50]

     It can be argued that Iran’s current push for economic integration vis-à-vis Iraq (oil industry, petro-chemical industry, political and security schemes etc.) –in a fairly patronizing way, to be clear- stems from the prospect of outmanoeuvring the imbalance in economic regionalism (GCC) in the medium term.[51] The importance of such ‘regional’ economic interdependence/capitalist integration[52] (common market, free trade zones, unified export strategies) is a logic that another regional power, namely Turkey, has also come to assert[53], certainly now that full EU membership seems not to be so imminent as once imagined (2000s). To use the keen insight of Turkey’s current Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu:

“Turkey is not the endpoint of ‘East’ and Greece for example is not the endpoint of ‘West’; in this global world this type of terminology should be changed. It is time to end these abnormalities [terminology]. What is normality? Normality means economic interdependence. […] Why do we need to call this Arab, Turkish or Iranian  [‘unions’]; call it regionalism. […] All countries want to play an important role. Some European countries want to play a global role and nobody questions this. When Turkey says we want to contribute to global peace [economic regionalism] then there is the question: ‘Do you want to create an Ottoman Empire?’ No!”[54]

The increasing allegations regarding Turkey’s so-called ambition to redeploy an ‘Ottoman Empire’ clearly parallels the ‘question’ of Iran’s supposed aspiration to consolidate a ‘Shiʿa Crescent’. The terminology applied in both questions is in fact quite irrelevant when it comes to 21st century economic and political realities of the Greater Middle East (GME). Apparently, the geo-economic ambitions of certain substantial states in this strategic sub-region of the globe are today increasingly discoursed with highly distortive and culturalistic labels. It is not whatsoever overblown to state that they are actively created as threat images enforcing a sense of fear on the popular level of society. It can legitimately be argued that such queries signal foremost a-priori biased frameworks of questioning. When Iran would gradually integrate with neighbouring Iraq, it would not only generate vast welfare (oil block) but most probably also mitigate the recurrence of warfare between the two most populated Gulf states –a strategy similar to the visions of the early founders of the current European Union.[55] In this view, it is no surprise that Iran is investing millions of dollars to engrain its influence in its Iraqi neighbour (housing, charity, security etc.). Iran’s policy calculations towards Iraq are not based on ‘brotherly Shiite’ support (sectarian altruism) but rather on prospects of economic and industrial integration schemes, certainly now they can enforce a favourable dominance over an economically weaker Iraq.[56]

Future dynamics of rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran are likely to intensify as Russian oil companies -who see the benefit in the absence of Western investors blocked by their own governments’ sanctions, ruling out any private investments in the Iranian oil or gas industry- might gradually step in to reduce Iran’s sectoral inefficiency. A Russian-Iranian oil partnership would strengthen the already existing political and military[57] ties between the two countries and subsequently further alarm Riyadh and the US about Iranian power-projection capabilities in the Gulf and the broader Middle East (Lebanon, Gaza).[58] Also China, widely believed to be “the only credible long-term rival to the United States”[59], has seemingly not felt intimidated by the US and its allies in working with Iran. Contrary to the EU, its companies invest daily in Iran’s energy potential. Chinese investments[60] have also come with subsequent military and diplomatic ties. Interestingly, this Chinese attitude has triggered US media headlines such as ‘How Dangerous is China?’. Every potent nation-state post-Cold War era, which might oppose US or EU strategic interests in the Middle East, is apparently ‘suspicious’, to say the least (Iran, Turkey, China). In accordance with labels attributed to Iran (‘Shiʿa Crescent’) and Turkey (‘Ottomanism’), one could arguably note an imminent tendency towards China-phobia that primarily stems from geo-economic (material) motives. Let us hereby not forget the joint 2010 Turkish-Brazilian initiative to try and broker a deal regarding Iran’s controversial nuclear programme –the initiative was flagrantly slammed by the US.[61] This dual, underlying and often asymmetric global relation with regard to Iran reflects in many ways the emerging multi-polar world economy (BRICS)[62], certainly now that US economic control over Latin America[63] (IMF, World Bank, CIA sponsored military coups) seems to be fading and vast Asian economies are advancing.[64] It is not is often mentioned, but the energy demands coming from Asian emerging economies, are today playing an increasingly important role in Middle Eastern political antagonisms, especially between Iran and Saudi Arabia. This is exemplified by recent media reports on India’s (US-backed)[65] altering commercial relations with Middle Eastern energy-exporting countries:

“Iran's oil industry has come under increasing pressure in recent months due to international sanctions. India, one of Iran's major customers, owes Tehran billions of dollars in dues which it cannot pay due to banking sanctions; Iran has threatened to cut back its exports to India, which has started buying more Saudi oil in response.”[66]

Since oil is still key in determining the national budget of both countries, an Iraqi alliance within OPEC would certainly serve to be a strategic and lucrative asset. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran hope that their Iraqi neighbour –with its 115 billion barrels of oil reserves- will endorse their preferred market strategy and geopolitical outlook. Saudi Arabia and Iran do not only have opposing geopolitical agendas as regards their regional security stance –Iran has always urged for a more indigenous security arrangement in the Persian Gulf, even before 1979, they are in a complementary sense also actively economically opposed. Moreover, if one inquires into military expenditure in the Persian Gulf, one is rendered with the impression of a regional arms race –leaving out the additional presence of the US fifth fleet, based in Bahrain.[67] For Iran, a post-Saddam Iraq,‘Shiʿa’ dominated or not, is in this sense no a-priori win-win situation. An independent or more Saudi-oriented Iraqi stand in the oil market would directly affect Iran’s current OPEC runner-up position. Tehran thus has a substantial economic incentive to further influence politics in Iraq: they can either lose or win a lot of petro-dollars. Much of this will be decided in the coming years during the political stabilization of Iraq.[68] This is an assessment the US administration also incorporated whilst trying to locate their ‘Axis of Evil’ during their 9/11 retaliation campaigns –as renowned journalist Robert Fisk contemplated: “let’s remember that most of the 9/11 killers were indeed Saudis”.[69] Clearly, political discourse and political policy, based on lucrative incentives, are two very distinctive matters.

Today, both Saudi Arabia and Iran have easily manoeuvred themselves into a patronizing position of disadvantaged confessional (and ethnic) groups in Iraq, Lebanon and ‘Palestine’, thus creating a distortive all-over image of sectarian politics throughout the Middle East. However, as the sectarian tradition in politics, in Lebanon for example, is of much structural nature -rooting in French colonial times (divide-and-rule, confessional favouritism)- the current status quo (institutionalized confessionalism) in some of these areas cannot simply nor solely be attributed to modern dynamics. Nevertheless, both countries probably perceive this contemporary setting as an utterly suitable momentum giving the importance of sectarian and religious components in their own political enterprises (mythology) and the geopolitical gains that can be made through such sectarian patronage.[70]

The Case of Iraqi Refugee Displacement to Jordan

When assessing the Iraqi refugee debacle, one immediately comes to note that the US has admitted less than a marginal 500 Iraqi refugees for asylum between 2003 and 2007. This stands in stark contrast to Sweden for instance, which accepted over 9,000 refugees during that period.[71] After the Vietnam War, however, the former had accepted 130,000 Vietnamese and Washington furthermore received over 80,000 Kosovars after the post-Yugoslav crisis in the late 1990s. Only after increasing international pressure (e.g. UNHCR, IOM) did it eventually admit 7,000 Iraqi refugees to enter its territory. This humanitarian apathy is best explained by the political climate subsequent to 9/11, dominated by the ‘War on Terror’. This fierce though vague anti-terror policy implied a direct neglect of human rights and the rule of law (accountability, responsibility) and furthermore propagated a dichotomous worldview (‘The Green Peril’) –building on an older dualism dating back to the Cold War and the ‘Communist Threat’- and endorsed unilateral US military action (Bush Doctrine) in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is best represented by neo-conservative policy monologues as ‘either you are with us or against us’. The persistence of this political discourse is reflected by the fact that US policy makers have, up until this very day, not paid substantial attention to the unfolding humanitarian debacle in Iraq, which is surely, as many experts have stated, “one of the least covered humanitarian crises in decades”.[72]

 Although European countries have relatively accepted more Iraqi refugees, a similar apathy pertained among the political elites in this part of the industrialized world. Displaced Iraqis have as such endured considerable difficulty to get recognized (or registered) as ‘refugees’. Today, they are more and more being pushed into the category of the unknown set of refugees (Somalis, Armenians[73], Afghans, Greek Cypriots) clearly contrasting other examples (Darfuri Somalis, Kosovars, etc.). Hitherto, there are therefore almost no visual images or voices that tail of this ongoing Iraqi crisis in the Western public sphere. During the previous decade a political lethargy vis-à-vis Iraq was accompanied by an increasing absurd societal focus on ‘identity’ (Muslim, Shiʿa, Sunni) –further encouraged by sensationalist academics (e.g. Huntington) who reinvented the racial ‘threats’ of the 19th and 20th centuries through the imagery of encroaching ‘civilizations’- inevitably crystallizing in a rise of global xenophobia. Viewed to the background of the aforementioned statistics of displaced Iraqis, one can fully understand the danger of applying such hollow anti-Shiʿa or anti-Muslim discourses.[74] 

 Applying this framework of global governance (‘War on Terror’), the largest donor of the UN, the United States, was seen to drastically decrease its humanitarian funding whereby countries such as Jordan and Syria have received minimal logistic and financial support in handling with the Iraqi refugee debacle. Since the dreadful events of September 11, displaced people in the Middle East are thought of less and less in humanitarian terms (human rights, international law), but all too often in merely dehumanized security terms (suspicion). In this way, refugees have increasingly been coded (‘character’) as potential threats, both in the Middle itself as on a broader global scale.[75] Rather than taking up any responsibility for post-war societal affairs, the US administration seems keen on systematically denying the war’s devastating impact, so as to keep up its discourse of political goodwill –‘Wilsonian idealism’, as critics such as Chomsky like to brand it.[76] Paul Bremer for instance, the head of the coalition prevision that ran Iraq after the invasion, fragrantly declared in front of the US congress that “the country was in chaos, socially, politically and economically [post-2003]; the deep crisis has been brought about not by war, not by sanctions, but by decades of corruption and incompetence of the Saddam regime”.[77] Although Saddam’s destructive legacy is surely known, it is quite interesting to see how the global power has had the monopoly on this matter, consistently attributing all (humanitarian) failures to the character of the political establishment predating the invasion. Similar arguments can be found in Yitzhak Nakash’s study entitled Reaching for Power: the Shiʿa in the Modern Arab World, which often tries to provide US policy towards Iraq with a noble raison d’être, hence establishing a gentle (civilizational) mythology that is often not only at odds with history and reality –US apathy for Saddam’s repression[78] inside its boarders during the First Gulf War is conveniently left out of the genealogy of bilateral affairs, as is the devastating US enforced UN embargo[79] in the early 1990s that mainly devastated Iraq’s civil society- there is, moreover, no attention given to the vast civil cost (‘collateral damage’)[80] of the US military project from 2003 onwards.[81]

Words are no mere objective markers that simply convey objective information. Surely in political affairs, certain words or concepts may imply different matters according to the definition one attributes to them or depending on the pretext in which they are used, e.g. ‘democracy’, ‘influence’, ‘destabilizing’ or ‘stabilizing’ [a country]. At times, their mere application can signal moral and philosophical orientations; how one perceives the world and how one propagates the world (ideology).[82] Discursive silence itself hence signifies not the boundary of an articulated idea, but rather forms an integral part of it and thus functions immediately along side of what is expressed. By gaining understanding into what is so actively and conveniently left out, one simultaneously sheds light on the very nature of a particular narrative and its underlying function (goal).[83]

The aforementioned global humanitarian pretext implies that countries such as Jordan and Syria, which had already experienced Iraqi refugee influxes during the 1980s (Iran-Iraq war) and 1990s (First Gulf War), were in the post-war aftermath (2003) left mainly to themselves in coping with a new, but unseen mass refugee displacement.[84] Moreover, a 2007 UNHCR report literally stated: “the [contemporary] ability of neighbouring states to handle such larger numbers is close to a breaking point. In recent months visa restrictions have been considered, which, if implemented, will result in Iraqis having greater difficulty finding a safe haven”.[85] These comments ventilate a build-up of logistic and economic pressure experienced by such leading host countries. Additionally, an assessment of the ‘sectarian whereabouts’ of these Iraqi refugees indicated that 27% of the Iraqi population seeking refuge in Jordan was affiliated to ‘Shiite culture’.[86] This is again quite significant when we recapitulate that the whole idea of a ‘Shiʿa Crescent’ actually initiated in Jordan.[87]

Although figures indicate that everywhere, except for Lebanon, the majority of Iraqi refugees were ‘Sunni’, one should note that Jordan has never harboured a substantial Shiite minority (‘sectarian make-up/ecology’), which, next to its geopolitical orientation, made the country a more feasible ground for discriminatory propaganda (top-down) and dialectic xenophobia (bottom-up) at a time when a visually ‘different’ population entered the country. While recognizing the fact that Iraqi refugees of the Sunni sect almost constituted double than that of the Shiite one in Jordan, it could nevertheless be argued that, to such a ‘Sunni’ scenery/backdrop, the ‘Shiite’ –i.e. Iraqi; the only unbiased denominator- influx must have had some visual effect on the societal level. It was most probably big enough to render a utile pretext, which enabled the most visible ‘immigrants’, that is, the (often impoverished) ‘Shiʿa’, to become the symbolic focal point of right-wing, government-led sectarian propaganda, serving both the political and economic agenda of the anti-Iranian establishment in Amman through (1) the spreading of anti-Shiite sentiment (associated with Iran) on a popular level and additionally through (2) the mitigation of humanitarian-related costs (visa restrictions), thus subtly pushing back domestic compliance with (basic) humanitarian solidarity stipulated by international law.[88] Critics have accurately dubbed the Jordanian policy on Iraqi refugees as “a mixture of making life manageable so as to avoid criticism, but difficult enough so that Iraqis will never feel comfortable enough to stay”.[89] In this light, it is remarkable that Bashar al-Assad hasn’t spoken of a ‘Shiite Infiltration’, a ‘Shiʿa Expansion’ or ‘tashayyu‘’ (doctrinal conversion to Shiism); such a political discourse would in fact not match with Syria’s geopolitical agenda –being a major ally of Iran and the Lebanese Hizbullah.

While reflecting on Iraqi migration in Jordan, Asher Susser has keenly pointed out a historical perspective by stating that fluxes of (Palestinian) migration and their subsequent political implications (PLO, Black September) have always posed a serious concern to the now experienced Jordanian establishment. The ruling Jordanian elite has often maintained a tensed relationship with segments of their (militant) Palestinian subjects. Notwithstanding the fact that the influx of an extremely wealthy Iraqi (Bathist) elite in 2003 initially contributed favourably to various sectors of the Jordanian economy, continuing Iraqi migration did seem to grow out to a serious domestic concern for a country heading towards recession –the US invasion did of course also affect Iraq’s main neighbouring countries (Turkey, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia). While at first, the Jordanian establishment interpreted the occurrence as a favourable elitist dynamic to counter the Palestinian demography and their (economic) influence in domestic affairs, after the numbers kept on augmenting, there was increasing anxiety about the kingdom’s political stability and economic viability. However, it is hereby also quite important not to overstate the economic impact of Iraqi refugees on the Jordanian economy since they only constituted one facet of many that caused pressure during the early 2000s.[90]

 Research has, for instance, interestingly indicated that Jordan’s contemporary inflation indeed related to the 2003 war, but also to structural shifts in the global movement of capital and government austerity measures predating the war.[91] The increase in domestic food prices, for instance, related directly to Jordan’s increasing exports to Iraq and the subsequent increase of (foreign-produced and) imported food to Jordan. The high oil prices in Jordan, which had quadrupled between 2002 and 2006, stemmed from the abolished (lucrative) contract with Saddam, but also from a gradual decrease of government subsidies of fuel as part of Jordan’s compliance with its pre-war implemented ‘Structural Adjustment Programme’ (SAP, IMF, WB). Increasing costs connected to land and housing purchase, particularly in Amman, also relate to events prior to the Iraqi refugee influx, namely 9/11. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, many wealthy investors from Gulf countries (e.g. Kuwaitis) became nervous about their US invested capital and therefore relocated large amounts of their foreign invested assets to nearby Jordan. This was mainly due to the fact that much of the country’s real estate and company shares were strongly undervalued. On top of all that, the Jordanian establishment’s monetary policy has always been to pegg the Jordanian dinar to the US dollar, implying that the weak dollar and dramatic problems in the US economy in the early 2000s consequently put severe and increasing pressure on the Jordanian economy as well. Hitherto, the Hashemite regime and the state media have, however, scarcely ever comprehensively debated these structural factors. Many seem simply to prefer mainly, if not uniquely, to blame the Iraqi refugees (‘Shiʿa’) as scapegoats for the economic turmoil. Conveniently, however, their arrival did coincide and add-up with increasing but quite ‘typical’ 21st century economic hardship in Jordan.[92] As some critics have been able to highlight, numerous distortive perceptions came into being in post-2003 Jordan with regard to the new ‘invaders’: [93]

 “Ask any Jordanian in Amman about Iraqis living in their country, and they will immediately tell you that Iraqis have driven up the prices of virtually anything in the capital. Apartments cost double what they did five years ago. The prices of food and gasoline have soared. Iraqis arrive with suitcases full of cash, drive around in expensive cars and make life much more difficult for Jordanians –or such is the widespread belief.”[94]

Moreover, when it comes to stereotyping Iraqi Shiʿa in particular, it is even worse:

“Jordanians lower their voices to tell you that the Shiʿa are not really Muslims, that they are trying to convert the Sunnis, that they are loyal to Iran and Hizbullah and that their creed sanctions sexual practices such as incest and group sex. References to a ‘Shiite Crescent’, a term coined by King Abdallah in late 2004, pop up spontaneously in conversations, indicating a sense that Jordan is surrounded by a hostile, alien force.”[95]

Keen and comprehensive scholarship has accurately pointed out that Jordan king Abdullah’s coining of the term ‘Shiʿa Crescent’ actually signals an implicit political statement towards the US and the Arab Gulf: “Invest in me, and I will be the praetorian guard of the Sunni order”.[96] Lebanon-specialist Augustus Richard Norton has briefly referred to the correlation between the anti-Shiite discourse and Iraqi migration in his article entitled The Shiite ‘Treath’ Revisited, however, without further elaborating on the matter.[97] Exclusivist political narratives are in fact quite widespread phenomena and often top-down generated for the sake of specific political and economic agendas. Clearly, the very social and economic pretext in Jordan (post-2003 refugee influx, inflation) was a ‘perfect’ converging setting for the king’s December 2004 proclamation of an Iranian-led ‘Shiite Crescent’, signalling a subjective reading and propagation of visible, underlying events occurring in the region. Hereby, a parallel can be made to recession-hit Europe, which has seen a consistent rise in xenophobic narratives over the last few years coming from right-wing populist parties; building up on the already existing institutional tradition of mythological propaganda, centred around a ‘unique’ European ‘identity’ –a top-down strategy to anticipate and cope with popular anxiety for the emerging liberal-economic experiment (EU).[98]

In this sense, it is surely no coincidence that crucial geostrategic events (2003 Iraq war), migration flows and state-centric (right-wing) discourses of ‘identity’ coincide. In historical perspective the 1923 Greek-Turkish ‘population exchange’ (refugee dynamic) and the Armenian genocide roughly coincided with World War I and it’s geopolitical aftermath (Treaty of Lausanne) and, more importantly, with the politically led consolidation of Turkish, Greek and even Armenian nationalism (reflexive xenophobia, politicized identities).[99] Although Jordan had already known Iraqi refugee influxes in the 1990s, which of course included mainly ‘Shiites’ at the time since they had risen up against Saddam in central and South Iraq, back then, this did not enflame such a campaign of sectarian mistrust, thus implicitly signalling a different geopolitical setting. Iran was at the time fairly contained and it was Saddam who had mainly posed a problem to the US-enforced security paradigm in the Persian Gulf area.[100] The latter could then of course not be linked to alien ‘Shiism’ and the creeping Iranian ‘Threat’ and was thus conveniently discoursed as a fascist comparable to Hitler –comparisons often include the haunting imagery of Europe and the US, alluding the public which it is meant to serve-, as of course Nasser had for geopolitical motives such as the nationalization of the Suez Canal been depicted as “a Mussolini by the Nile” by Egypt’s former colonial rulers. At the eve of the First Gulf War all means were suitable as to ensure the steady flow of cheap oil to one of the world largest consuming domestic markets, the United States of America.[101]

 The appearance and form of political discourses are always dependent on the regional economic reality (e.g. economic boom or recession, economic migration, war-inflicted migration) and the geopolitical setting (e.g. ‘War on Terror’, US-backed regional opposition to Iran). Regrettably, it is often the weak (migrated) groups within a society that become first and foremost target of such pseudo-intellectual operations, which then completely de-link the migrant from any nationality and strip him of any rationally-explainable social and economic motive. The ‘migrant’ Other is often used, that is, discoursed in a xenophobic manner, for the interest of certain other, often more powerful, groups within the same society. Today the ‘foreigner’, as the 21st century migrant, is often actively linked into a vague cultural matrix that directly problematizes his presence and existence, so this is, as indicated, not uniquely a Middle Eastern feature. This process is often a shaped monologue where the individual, the human face and true actor, is seen to disappear into a homogenized group, whereby he is totally absent for any rational input nor for crucially defending or alerting the outside world of his actual human needs.[102]

It has interestingly been pointed out that after anti-Shiʿa fears and rumours kicked in, all of a sudden, Hizbullah had lost some of its popularity in the Jordanian street. Seemingly, the Lebanese party had previously been thought of as an ‘Arab vanguard’ in popular terms after its July 2006 confrontation with the Israeli Defence Forces. However, this being said, research has significantly indicated that many of Jordan’s population still believe that the sectarian campaign is somehow top-down inflated and stemming from geopolitical motives (Hizbullah, Iran) rather than from a genuine societal expression.[103] Jordanian (popular) resentment of ‘Shiʿa’ is often legitimized by making accusatorial reference to the (festivity) date of Saddam’s 2006 execution, which was interpreted as a sectarian provocation. Today, Saddam’s imagery is hence oddly but increasingly serving as a mythological ‘Sunni-Arab hero’ in popular Jordanian consciousness –again the US’s role in this supposed ‘sectarian matter’ falls blank here. Various scholars have nevertheless been elaborating on the idea of a ‘Shiite Crescent’ or, as many scholars in the West seem to prefer, on a ‘Shi’a Rise’, reflecting the fundamental idea of a sectarian threat/conflict sprouting from an enshrined ‘cultural divide’ for explaining regional politics.[104] More realist inclined scholars can of course be referred to so as to remind us of one of the largest military campaigns of the previous decade:

“It took American power to break the state in Iraq. And we did; we broke it completely. We not only conquered and broke the regime, but we then broke the state by breaking up the army and turning the bureaucracy on its head. But that took American power to do it. Nowhere else had that happened. Even in the Iranian Revolution –was a huge change from below, but the Iranian state preserved.”[105]

Hence, such popular Arab support for Hizbullah (2006) should in fact not impressionistically be interpreted as ‘trans-sectarian’ sympathy, or, even more sensational, as a sign of alleged wide scale tashayyu‘/conversion, but rather as a regional expression of political opposition to Israel and of communal (Arab) solidarity, to be viewed to a structural backdrop of modern regional warfare with or related to Israel (1948 Arab-Israeli war, 1956 Suez Crisis, 1967 Six-Day War, 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, 1983 bombings of Osirak etc.) in which the Palestinian Question[106] has come to symbolize a highly sensitive geopolitical –and in the Arab and Muslim popular sphere even mythological- marker for structural and enduring Middle Eastern malaise.[107] In the Middle Eastern and North African region, this popular politicized sentiment regarding Palestinian symbolism roots in a now historical tradition, easily detectable in the regional musical folklore -e.g. in lyrics of one of the most popular bands in modern Moroccan history, Nās al-Ghiwān[108], i.c. songs as ‘Sabra wa Shatilla’[109], ‘Intifada’[110] (1987) and ‘Falastin’[111]. Although the whole trend of Ra’i music was about localized popular realities, it did carry a strong social component that often focused upon regional events to implicitly address and ventilate domestic and regional discontent -Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer have since long categorized music as an incredible art form that has the ability to mobilize people as no other.[112] Although simplistic media coverage and self-proclaimed experts have numerously depicted sectarian denominators as significant sociological and political categories, they do not whatsoever correspond with omnipresent heterogeneous socio-political realities and can thus not whatsoever be used to brew up sterile and homogenous communities with a supposed unity of purpose, both within Iraq and the region as a whole. The flare-up of anti-US and intra-Iraqi violence in the mid-2000s under the banner of religiosity and sectarian affiliation tail more of Iraq’s post-war reality dubbed as one of ‘existential insecurity’ than of a supposed appearance of the country’s authentic cultural fabric or of a regional sectarian clash.[113]

In accurately dismissing the concept of ‘pan-Shiism’, Vali Nasr, a leading Shiʿa expert in the US, has already noted that historical transnational migration between Iraq and Iran created “numerous, layered connections between the two countries’ Shiite communities”.[114] Hereby, he tries to explain the rise/usage of cultural ties in a rational manner, but strikingly enough, when migration is being assessed he does not whatsoever mention modern westward migration during the more recent post-Saddam era, nor does he signal the direct correlation between this dynamic and the emergence of culturalistic anti-Shiite rhetoric emanating from Jordan and its regional political allies. This logic is simply overlooked by those who tend to attribute a dominant position to culture in often sensationalist analyses –and not balance cultural realities to structural processes of economic, political and migratory nature. By portraying certain groups of Iraqi refugees as mere ‘Shiites’, one actually dehumanizes the Iraqi refugee debacle and, more importantly, almost denies and annihilates the geopolitical nature (2003 US-led invasion), which triggered this very crisis. By culturally politicizing weaker societal groups (refugees) within regional interstate conflicts with Iran, one also overlooks the seriousness of this humanitarian catastrophe and therefore one inevitably distracts the general public’s attention away from more relevant/acute debates that carry a more humanitarian basis (housing, jobs, medical or psychological aid, political/legal accountability). Rather, it is all about ‘cultural exceptionalism’ (communitarian cages, ‘tolerance’) in today’s age of pulp -branded as one of ‘post-politics’ by critics such as Slavoj Žižek- further undermining hard-won ideas regarding universal humanity.[115]

Conclusion

It is clear that a dynamic of US inflicted warfare (2003), regional political instability and transnational refugee displacement, rather than any imagined Iranian-promoted conversion to Shiism is able to explain the societal susceptibility for such a sectarian political discourse as that of the ‘Shiite Crescent’. Numerous migratory influxes of deprived Iraqis will inevitably have stepped up ‘Shiʿa’ (‘foreign’) visibility within the region’s public consciousness. This dynamic also coincided with Iran post-2003 decontainment -serving as the deeper political pretext for this specific sectarian campaign- Hizbullah’s July 2006 decharge and a deteriorating intra-Iraqi security situation in the mid-2000s, slipping beyond the US’s control. As such, not only Iran’s geopolitical ascendance in the post-Saddam era, but also a flow of regional migration might explain a perception of a regional ‘Shiitization’ and furthermore accurately contextualize the Jordanian and Saudi elites’ response to these events.

 Moreover, as regards Iraq’s structural significance, there is much at stake for both Iran and Saudi Arabia –one of Jordan’s main regional allies, aspiring to become the new Arab powerhouse- since effective and suitable bilateral political relations with the newly emerging Iraqi elite will certainly bring about a subsequent partnership during any OPEC deliberations to settle the cartel’s market strategy (commodity prices). Since oil is still key to any economy in the Gulf (rentier model), Iraq’s potential has the crucial ability to decisively impact the decision making process within the oil cartel. These dynamics are all the more important now that energy demands (fossil fuels) are gradually increasing due to the enormous expansion of emerging Asian economies (China, India etc.) and as long as the volatile security paradigm in the Persian Gulf persists. Iraq’s contemporary relevance was demonstrated recently, during the popular uprising in the Arab world (June 2011), when the OPEC summit that had convened in Vienna was unable to reach a new consensus on global oil supply (production quotas) and commodity prices. Hereby, a revenue-hungry Iraq interestingly joined Iran in its obstruction to the Saudi-led GCC offer to industrialized nations of generously filling up Libya’s supply deficit and setting the price at a fixed $80 a barrel (market stabilization). In this sense, rumours about a `Shiite Danger`, a `Shiite Block` or a `Shiite Crescent` rather relate to petro-dollars and geo-economic rivalry (new alliances) than any bottom-up cultural opposition. So, when we recapitulate the words of Nawaf Obaid, a former security advisor of Saudi King Abdullah, one is left with different impression (material incentive) on why Saudi Arabia would intervene into Iraqi affairs: “As the birthplace of Islam and the de facto leader of the world's Sunni community (which comprises 85 percent of all Muslims), Saudi Arabia has both the means and the religious responsibility to intervene [in Iraq].”[116]

It is quite striking to see how the US’s interventionist role in the region, along with some of its specific humanitarian consequences such as the Iraqi refugee debacle, are depicted as ‘mere’ short-term and marginal phenomena, while sectarian-induced violence –there can never be enough culturalistic name-dropping- is claimed to be the ‘fundamental’ and long-term problem causing the failure of the Iraqi state and its societal co-existence; this serving as a prototype of the ‘problematic’ Middle East, which is somehow in itself and by it’s ‘nature’ irreconcilable to the ideas of modern day, market-driven civil coexistence. The contemporary dominance of this treat of political and social apathy (e.g. disregard for internal law, humanitarian needs) is equally symbolized by the ongoing dehumanization of the Gazan civilian population. By solely speaking of Hamas and of ‘Islam’ during the Israeli 2009 military assault, one effectively ignores the question of accountability for (disproportionate) human suffering –ventilated by numerous UN resolutions- and, moreover, loses all touch with the reality of human universality (human rights). By indicating an Iraqi (‘Shiʿa’) refugee dynamic one thus comes to a more balanced and rational comprehension for the emergence of regional Shiʿa phobia on both the political and societal level.

Comprehensively, global and Middle Eastern protagonists (politicians, clerics, journalists) claiming to engage ‘Shiism’ or ‘Shiʿa’ as a (transnational) ‘whole’, often merely convey highly politicized (ideological) messages that do not intend to relate to religion itself, but rather to geopolitics, geo-economics and even reactionary domestic politics, in casu the promotion of Iran`s regional containment, of decreasing the power of its Levantine allies/proxies (Hizbullah, Hamas, Syria), lobbying for Iraq’s strategic OPEC shares and even mitigating domestic political opposition (Bahrain) to reinforce autocratic (monarchical) rule. In the latter case, activists calling for democratic liberalization (participation) and the redistribution of wealth in the lucrative Gulf were flagrantly met with accusations of foreign conspiracy. Ultimately, the narrow notion of politicized, monolith and linear (reflexive) sectarian identities (‘continua’) were and are mainly propagated by key Arab states such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt -i.e. the previous Mubarak regime- to reaffirm their post-9/11 geopolitical alignment with the US in the post-Saddam Middle Eastern order, to safeguard their regional interests vis-à-vis Iran’s apparent post-2003 political ascendance, and to intelligently (perception, media) engage the latter regionally by propagating threat images of Shiism and Shiites. The Iranian nation state is, however, not fundamentally driven by (‘warmongering’) ideology, but as any geopolitical unit, it rather bases its foreign policy on mainly rational (material) considerations, such as the mitigation of US hegemonic projections in the energy-rich Persian Gulf in favour of a more endogenous security paradigm, which it would conveniently but also quite naturally (geographical size, demography, resources, industrial potential etc.) come to dominate in the medium-term. The ‘Shiʿa Crescent’ conception, which has in various ways been applied in academia, is a highly phantasmagorical and distortive theory that should be discarded entirely by any serious and unbiased scrutiny of contemporary Middle Eastern politics.

 
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